CLASSIC: Interview: Who Killed JFK? with Rob Reiner

In the wake of the death of Rob Reiner and his spouse Michele, Ben, Matt and Noel share some of their memories working with Rob and return to their classic interview with him, from 2023: Sixty years ago this week, US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. In tonight's conversation, Ben, Matt and Noel join the legendary director, actor, writer, and activist Rob Reiner to explore the assassination -- in his newest project, Rob finally answers the question: Who killed JFK?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist, we are returning to you with a classic.
We usually publish a classic episode or an interview that
we feel is relevant or worth your time. As many
of us know in the audience tonight, our good friend

(00:23):
Rob Reiner has passed away as well as his spouse.
We want to respect their memory and the privacy of
their family at this time, but we also want to
hold space for just the excellent work he did earlier
on a show about the mystery of JFK.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, that's right. He and his wife, Michelle Singer Reiner
were discovered deceased in their home and it's an ongoing investigation.
Does seem like there's definitely foul plays, so we want
delve into that aspect of it. But we just found
him to be such a lovely jenner, us intelligent and
kind man in this conversation, and I think we all
had our you know, starstruck moment with him, as his

(01:08):
work has loomed large in all of our lives, and
it was just so neat to meet somebody who absolutely
delivers on being what you exactly what you hope they would.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Be, absolutely And there are details that Rob and the
entire team uncovered while they were making Who Killed JFK
that we don't even get into in this episode, fully
because it was coming out at the time that we
recorded this interview with him. But there is stuff in
there that I had never heard before. Specific names, locations,

(01:40):
you know, all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Co hosted by Sola Dad O'Brien. Who Killed JFK was
really close to Rob and it's something that he had
spent decades thinking about investigating, and it did just such
a phenomenal job with his team. We fanboy a little

(02:04):
bit in this interview, to be fair, but I think
we were all just unanimously so fundamentally impressed that you
could be a guy this cool and this accurate for.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Sure, And so you know, if you're looking for a
way to honor his memory, I know he would love
it if you listened to that serious because it was
something that, to y'all's point, had been ges dating, you know,
in him for a long, long long time. And also
check out the sequel to Spinal Tap, which he hipped
us to the fact that he was working on that
when we all off, Mike told him how much we

(02:42):
loved that movie. It's out now in streaming.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
So without further ado, let's hear from Rob.

Speaker 4 (02:48):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
They call me Ben. We're joined with our guest super producer.
Back to the freight train, Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. As you are listening to this
on the day this podcast publishes, it is an infamous
anniversary in the United States. Sixty years ago, the President

(03:40):
of the US John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated November twenty second,
nineteen sixty three, riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
The tragedy of this day fundamentally altered the course of
American and indeed global history. Decades later, the world and
tire still has questions about what led to this murder

(04:03):
and how it occurred. We've asked these questions previously in
Stuff they Don't Want you to Know, but tonight we
are immensely fortunate to be joined with the legendary director,
the actor, the activist, the writer now podcaster Rob Reiner,
creator and co host of Who Killed JFK? Thank you

(04:24):
for joining us, Rob, It is a profound honor.

Speaker 5 (04:28):
Oh thank you, Ben. This so sweet to you. Thanks
for having me.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Can I just get my fanboy thing out of the
way really quick? But this is Spinal Tap is my
favorite movie of all time, and that force everyone in
my life to watch it while I literally tear up
because it's very nice and hilarious and it's just everything
I love about rock and roll. It's so good. Well,
I hear you're work.

Speaker 5 (04:46):
It'll it'll make you feel good that we're now engaged
in the filming a sequel. We're going to do it.
It's the first time in forty years. We came up
with an ida and the four of us are going
to get out there and and make a sequel to
Spinal Tape. Take it to eleven.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
The three of us are musicians and uh we we've
you know, got video degrees and everything, so we we
just are right in that exact place where this is
spinal like where Spinal Tap just is, like I don't
know it's a mecha.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Saloom's large And I just wrapped up a podcast documentary
about the Stones in seventy two, and I had a
lot of tape I was working with from them from
those days, and I realized, I think you were doing
their voices. I think the spinal tap guys are the
Stones circa seventy two, with their soft spoken, little British
little something to it. Maybe I'm wrong, but.

Speaker 5 (05:43):
In the film, there's a fine line between stupid and clever,
and we try, we try to hit that line.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
And isn't that Isn't that also in some ways part
of the discourse that has surrounded uh, the allegations of
conspiracy in the JFK assassination.

Speaker 5 (06:01):
You know, look at that segue. Wow, I gotta I
gotta put a neck brace on uh and call my
insurance agent because.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
He's got a point, though, Rob stupid and clever, that
that's something that we see a lot with conspiracy stuff,
because yeah, that's true. Maybe clever is a bit of
a misnomer, but it's all about like how close are
there facts involved? Is there some logical reasoning behind it?
Or are people just passing the time?

Speaker 5 (06:30):
Right? Right? No, you're You're exactly right, because the name,
the words conspiracy theory have gotten a weird take now
because everybody you know who's aspiring to you know, QAnon
or disinformation or they're going on wacky websites and things.

(06:51):
Anybody who talks about conspiracy theory has got a tinfoil
hat and you know, is running around, you know, spotting
UFOs all over the place. But there are actual conspiracies
that actually happened, and this is one of them. And
the podcast that we do Who Killed JFK? That I

(07:12):
do with Solidad O'Brien is the deepest dive and the
most comprehensive look at that conspiracy and how it happened.
And you know, as we say in the podcast, it's
the greatest murder mystery in the history of America. Nothing
like it has ever happened before. And the America was traumatized.

(07:35):
There was a concentrated trauma put at the heart of
America at that point, and people who were alive at
the time will never get over it. It was a
collective trauma that gripped the entire country and we're still
feeling the effects of it today.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
And that note about never getting over it, there's something
there's something poetic with the beginning of episode one. I
think maybe we also before we start with the first
episode of Who Killed JFK. Let's travel back, if it's
all right, to your experience to the moment the day

(08:18):
of the assassination. Again, it's November twenty second, nineteen sixty three,
just a few days before Thanksgiving. You are, I believe,
sixteen years old. Could you paint the picture for us
and for our listeners of that experience.

Speaker 5 (08:35):
Yes, I mean, anybody who was alive at that time
and was aware knows exactly where they were when they
heard that news. You can talk to anybody, they'll tell
you exactly where they were and what was happening. I
was sixteen, as you said, I was in high school.
I was in my physics class, and I'll never forget
a student walked in whispered into the teacher's ear, and

(08:58):
he turned to us and said, I have some terrible news,
and he related to us what had happened to the president,
and we were all just stunned and shocked. We were
sent home from school. Everybody was sent home, and we
turned on our televisions and we watched non stop a

(09:20):
television on the reports up until and I was one
of the people who watched the person who was accused
of killing President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. I watched him
get assassinated on live television. I mean it actually happened.
I watched this man. We found out his name was

(09:42):
Jack Ruby, who's a local nightclub owner of a place
called the Carousel Nightclub. He went into the Dallas police station,
drew a gun and stood right in front of Lee
Harvey Oswald and shot him to death. And for many
of us, that was the moment at which we said,
what the heck is going on? The man who has
supposedly killed the president is now being murdered himself. Why

(10:06):
is that happening? Who's doing this? Who's behind all this?

Speaker 3 (10:11):
You're talking to three guys who were born in the eighties,
so you know, when we first encounter this, we get
to an age where, you know, our parents decide we
can learn about the JFK assassination, or our schools decide
we are allowed to learn about it. We have all
of this information already built in, right, but in going
back and listening to Who Killed JFK this podcast, we're
being presented with this information as it was happening, right,

(10:34):
So we get that experience that you're sharing with us now, Rob.
And one of the things you mentioned early on is
how comedians like Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory were kind
of they're using their material as a way for America
to begin to process this information, right, Yes, Yes, And
what's interesting about that is these guys were both brilliant

(10:58):
social and political setu arterists.

Speaker 5 (11:00):
These were the most incisive, well observed type people who
looked at American life and observed it in the most
intelligent and fine way. And when they diverged from their
normal routines. In the case of Mortsaul, I was nineteen
when I watched him go. I was opening for The

(11:22):
Hungry Eye for a singer named Carmen McCrae who was
a great jazz singer. And when I would finish my
set with my partner Larry Bishop, we'd go into this
smaller room where Dick, where mort Saul was not doing
his normal routine. He was only talking about the Kennedy
assassination and the Warren Commission report on the assassination had

(11:45):
come out and he was attacking it. He was saying,
it's full of lies. It doesn't make any sense. And
that and people like Dick Gregory who went on Geraldo
Rivera's show and for the first time they exposed the
Zapruder film, which was the film that the only film
that really captures the assassination by a guy named Abraham Zapruder,

(12:08):
was a local dressmaker. Those people, those two comedians, really
started the conversation moving forward. People started getting engaged, and
those people could draw your attention. They were great speakers,
They were great incisive commentators on the times. When I
saw Mark Saul, I started really getting into it. I

(12:31):
read a book called Rush to Judgment by a writer
named Mark Lane, and he completely disbanded the Warren Commission
and pointed out the inconsistencies, the things that were left out,
the lies. And you started getting into realizing that this

(12:51):
was not only a cover up by the government of
what had happened, but it uncovered as you track it
over the years, this conspiracy that American forces got together
to kill an American president in broad daylight on an
American street. And the more you look into it, the

(13:15):
more disturbing it is. And you know, I was saying that,
you know, you look at something like this, and that
sixty years has gone by, and unless you're following it closely,
there are revelations that come out in drips and drabs,
and when they come out, unless you're following it all,
you don't know what that has to do with anything else.

(13:37):
So this podcast what it does is it takes sixty
years of revelations, puts it all in one place and
hopefully makes it understandable to people and completely you know,
fills in the puzzle of what actually happened on that.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Deckh And this is something that I think is key
the contextualization. We were talking a little bit air rub.
People who are somewhat familiar with the JFK assassination and
the ins and outs of it may be surprised to
learn that documents pertaining to it were classified until quite
recently and new information begins to emerge. Who killed JFK?

(14:19):
Does a phenomenal job of connecting some of these puzzle pieces,
And already you've mentioned some very bright points about this
that remain controversial, especially the Warren Commission, which I think
you do a supreme and scrupulous job of pointing out

(14:41):
some possible conflicts of interest possible Yeah, Okay, well, guys, Rob.

Speaker 5 (14:48):
Here's what's interesting about this. Yeah, there were huge conflicts
of interests. First of all, there's still almost five thousand
documents that have not been released to the public, and
you know, we may never see those documents. But the
conflict of venters that you're talking about, and there were
two investigations. People have to understand. There are two official

(15:10):
government investigation of the assassination of JFK. The first was
the Warren Commission, which came out in nineteen sixty four,
and the second one was done by a group called
the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and now it came
out in the mid seventies. It came out to actually
the report came out in the late seventies. Both of
those investigations were compromised. And the way in which that

(15:36):
happened is in the first investigation, the Warrant Commission, Lindon
Johnson was very concerned about things getting out that might
implicate the Russians or the Cubans in a way that
might ultimately cause a nuclear war, and he wanted to

(15:57):
avoid that. He didn't want any information to come into
the investigation that would do anything but point to Lee Harvey,
Oswald as a loan gunman. So what he did is
they put together this commission headed up by Chief Justice
Earl Warren, but his name was mostly titular in this

(16:18):
they put in charge of the gatekeeper sense of all
information coming from the CIA into the hands of a
man named Alan Dulles. Alan Dulles was the first civilian
head of the CIA in the nineteen forties. Now, Alan

(16:39):
Dulles was one of the architects of the Bay of
Pigs invasion. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an attempt
by the CIA to train Cuban exiles to go into
Cuba and overthrow Castro, who had overthrown Battista just a
few years prior. Alan Dulles had this plan with the CIA,

(17:03):
working with these Cuban exiles, they went into the Bay
of They went into Cuba and they did invade, and
they thought that Kennedy would offer air support, that once
the troops got in there, they would send American planes
and they would take back Cuba. Kennedy told them before

(17:25):
the And by the way, Kennedy inherited this plan from
Eisenhower and Nixon. He was only in office for two
or three months when they when they did this. He
told them ahead of time, I will not send American
airplanes because I don't want the United States footprint. I
don't want to any fingerprints on to be tracked back

(17:45):
to the United States. He told them that, and Dulles said,
there's no way, don't worry about it. Once we get
in there, he's going to see this and he's going
to want to send those those airplanes. He never did,
and what happened was all the Cuban exes. They were
slaughtered on the beaches in Cuba, and it was a
complete and utter disaster. Months later, Kennedy fires Alan Dulles,

(18:11):
and very you know is known to have said, I
want to take the CIA and break it up into
a thousand pieces. He was furious at the CIA because
they were doing these covert activities without presidential approvals. I mean,
they were doing them separately and then you know, then
reporting back to the president. So he wanted to get

(18:32):
rid of it. He puts Johnson puts Alan Dulles in
charge of any information coming from the CIA into the
Warrant Commission, and you know, obviously nothing got in. No,
we didn't know, we didn't know about the CIA's connection
to the mafia. We didn't know about the CIA's extra

(18:54):
judicial killings of heads of state, which they did many
of We didn't know about out a lot of the
involvement with the Cubans in Cuba. We didn't know any
of this stuff. So Alan Dalles is compromising that. Now.
The big revelation, the big, big, big revelation was in

(19:15):
the second investigation that was for the House Select Committee
on Assassinations. And we bring this up in the podcast
as well. And this didn't come out, This didn't come
out until years after the investigation. But the man put
in charge of being the liaison between the House Investigation

(19:37):
and the CIA was a man named George Joannedes. You've
never heard of his name, You don't know who he is,
but I can. What I'll tell you is George Joannedes
was a former CIA agent and he was the head
of a counter intelligence program that developed assets, one of

(20:00):
which was Lee Harvey Oswalald. So the guy who was
the gatekeeper again to the CIA was the very guy
who they wanted to who they should have questioned. We
interviewed Robert Blakey, who was the counsel to the House
Select Committee. He had no idea that this is what

(20:23):
Joe and Edes did. And when he found out many
years later, he was furious. He said, if I had
known then what I knew now, I would have put
Joe and Edies on the stand. He was the answer
to many of our questions of how the CIA was
involved in the assassination. So you know, there you have

(20:43):
two big pieces of information there, separated by many, many years,
and we try to put it all together in one place.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
And there's also the question a lot of our fellow
listeners will be asking, which is is there such thing
as a former CIA agent?

Speaker 5 (21:02):
It makes me think, no, there's there's no such thing.
I mean a CIA agent.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (21:08):
You you you you may not be active in the
way you were when you were being paid by the agency,
but you have security clearance and uh you have it
for your life. And you you know, it was an
interesting thing recently with a Trump I think try to
strip uh? And did I think strip uh John Brennan

(21:30):
of his security clearance because you didn't like what John
Brennan was saying about him and about his uh, you know,
his involvement in January sixth. So yes, you're you're always connected.
Once you once you're there.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Even about the clearances. I mean the relationships, these lifelong
relationships and contacts that you can leverage even minus the
security clearances. Correct, I mean I think that stuff is
money in the bank.

Speaker 5 (21:55):
Yeah, No, that that's that's true power.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
Just a real quick insert here for anybody that wants
to deep down the rabbit hole. I'm looking at a
declassified document here that describes mister Johan Ed's work from
December nineteen sixty two to April nineteen sixty four, and
it describes him as the case officer for the Cuban
Exile Group Directorio Revolutioncenario as Study and teal is known

(22:20):
as student.

Speaker 5 (22:21):
Yeah, it's a student directed anti Castro group.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
And there's there's something else too. And I know people
are yelling at their phones right now or however you
listen to shows the House Select Committee, you have this,
you have this terrifying observation rob in who killed JFK.
Where you say, look, these are two fundamentally flawed investigations

(22:50):
and they reach two very different conclusions. And one thing,
one thing that I think stands out for people were
who were born after that assassination is to read the conclusion.
So the House Select Committee, and see that they have
dropped the C word. They have said the assassination seemed

(23:11):
to be the result of a I believe the quote
is probable conspiracy. Y, yes, I mean the Warren Commission
basically said that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman,
did it all by himself.

Speaker 5 (23:24):
The House Select Committee said it was probably a conspiracy
based on all the investigation they had done, but they
didn't say who was involved in the conspiracy. They never
could get that far because of this guy, George Joannides.
They didn't name the mob, they didn't name the CIA,
they didn't talk about the Cuban exilese. They just said,

(23:45):
based on the information they had, it was probably a conspiracy.
So you have two diametrically opposed conclusions, and that those
are the two government.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
Records now and Warren Commission is nineteen sixty four, so
very soon after the assassination, and the House Select Committee
isn't until nineteen seventy six. So just imagine, like again,
already we've got decades separating, a decade separating these two things.
And you wonder why Americans in general, you're talking about

(24:17):
drips and drabs information coming out from the very beginning.
It's like we're getting little bits and pieces right, and
I swear it feels like it's designed that way.

Speaker 5 (24:27):
Yeah, well, I don't know design, but if you think
about you mentioned Dick Gregory. The House Select Committee was
born out of an investigation by Idaho Senator Frank Church.
They had a committee there set up in the Senate
and that was based on information that was coming out

(24:51):
that the CIA was doing all kinds of things that
they were not aware of. And it came out as
a revelation during that that they were doing these extra
judicial killings, that other things were going on. And then
Dick Gregory went on The Heraldo Show and they showed
the Zapruder film for the first time. Now, the Zapruder

(25:11):
film was, you know, the Warren Commission saw it. The
public had not seen it. Nobody still need photographs, just
some still photographs, but we didn't have a context and
we didn't see it. When that came out and the
Church Committee started revealing what they knew, that gave birth

(25:32):
to the House Select Committee. And that was, like you say,
well over ten years after the Warren Commission came out.
So now all of a sudden, you have another flashpoint now,
when Oliver Stone made his film a JFK in nineteen
ninety two or ninety one, I believe it was that
also triggered the JFK Records Act and the creation of

(25:57):
the Assassination Records Review Board, which was another investigation. So
these things are separated by many, many years, and during
each of these investigations, more and more and more information
came out. So, like I say, it's very tough to follow.
And unless you're tracking all this stuff when it comes out,

(26:18):
you wouldn't You wouldn't know how to put those pieces together.
That's what we try to do in this podcast.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
And you do it.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, I would say accomplished so far. And folks, full
disclosure here we are in media arrests. We are listing
along with you all. We do not know how this
story concludes, yet we do what I do. Want to
throw one thing here, that's an interesting note, Rob that.

Speaker 5 (26:43):
I before you say that, before you put a pin
in it, I want to hear the interesting note. But
by the end of it, by the tenth episode, you
will hear what we believe happened that day, and we
will name the shooters that we believe are shooting, and
we will name the positions that we believe those shooters
were in. So I'm just no level.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Will you come back on the show?

Speaker 5 (27:09):
Sure?

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Sure, absolutely, Okay, so it'll be later than this, early
in the morning, we promised you.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
So there's something interesting in speaking of contextualization. There is
a there is a deep temptation often that pulls us
away from objectivity when we start connecting dots, right because
humans identify patterns. And I noticed that of the seven
official members of the Warren Commission, one died under it

(27:39):
or disappeared under extremely mysterious circumstances before the House Select Committee,
uh and the Church Committee got their crack at this,
And that would be Hail Bogs, who disappeared over over
the hinterlands of Alaska.

Speaker 5 (27:56):
There was a plane crash that you know, we can't
say sure what happened there. We don't know, and we're
not going to be some conjecture over this. It happened.
But there are a lot of mysterious deaths that occurred

(28:17):
right after the Warren Commission came out. There was a
very famous woman who was married to a CIA agent.
Her name is Mary Meyer, and her sister was having
an affair with Jack Kennedy and she died at the
minute the And this is one of the reasons I
wanted Solidad O'Brien to do this with me, because she

(28:39):
did a podcast about this called Murder on the Towpath
in which this woman was assassinated walking in Georgetown. And
the day that she was killed, James Angleton, who was
the head of counter intelligence for the CIA, along with
Ben Bradley, who was editor of the Washington Post, they

(28:59):
arrived at Mary Meyer's art studio and confiscated a diary
that she kept. So there's that. And you know Dorothy Killgallan,
who was killed shortly after attending the Jack Ruby trial
and was the only one to have actual interviews with

(29:20):
Jack Ruby. She was killed. And there was a number
of people that we did a study and there were
about I think eighteen critical key witnesses who died of
either a heart attack or suicide or accident or jump
out of a window something within two years of the assassination.

(29:40):
And they ran some numbers on it and it's like
seven hundred trillion, I mean, some crazy number the odds
of all of those people dying in that way. But
you know, we don't get into any of that stuff
because we can't prove why these people died. I mean,
and so what we've tried to do in the podcast

(30:01):
is just stick with what we know. These are things
we know, and then you know, we do our best
guess as to put together based on everything we know,
what actually happened.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
And we'll pause here for a word from our sponsor
before we return and ask Rob Ryder who killed JFK.
And we have returned.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
We talked a little bit off Mike before we started rolling,
just about this event being sort of the beginning of
this massive polarization of the American people, and it being
you described it as sort of an end of innocence,
and I think in Ben you wrote in the outline
here this really was a moment that you could trace

(30:50):
back to when distrust in our government really kind of
began as much more of a mainstream thing. Rob, can
you kind of cut couple all those ideas together into
sort of your thoughts on what that end of innocence means?

Speaker 5 (31:04):
And well, I mean, we you know, after the Second
World War, we were the heroes, We were the good guys,
and we couldn't do nothing wrong. I mean, we you know,
we had prosperity and people, you know, the gi Bill
and people were living in you know, the suburbs, and
they were you know, things were doing, you know, better
for a lot of people, not for not for black people,

(31:26):
but for a lot of Americans. And then you have
this moment happened in nineteen sixty three where it's like
your father was he I mean, you know, the leader
of the country was just killed like that. And we
knew at the time, I mean, which came out that
Kennedy was trying to make a forge a path to peace.

(31:48):
He gave a very famous speech at American University where
he talked about we cannot go down this road of
nuclear holocaust. We have to find a way to forge
path to peace. Well, in the context of that, he
wrote a memo which is on file that he was

(32:09):
going to call for the removal of a thousand troops
out of Vietnam that year and the removal of all
military out of Vietnam by the end of nineteen sixty five. Now,
we don't know would he have done that, would he
not have done that. What we do know is that
he wrote the memo, and certainly the hardliners in the
CIA and the military knew that, and they were worried

(32:32):
that that was going to happen. So what happens. Kennedy
gets assassinated, Johnson becomes president, and the next thing you know,
we're stepping up the war in Vietnam. And that to
me was the beginning of a huge divide in America.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Who does that benefit though, staying in Vietnam? Like I
think I understand, but just from your respective like the hardliners,
as you mentioned, like, who is benefiting from US maintaining
a presence in Vietnam when it was such a disastrous,
you know, conflicts.

Speaker 5 (33:01):
Well, first of all, ideologically, the hardliners are thinking, and
that was certainly the thoughts of the day, there was
a better dead than red. They believed that there was
this domino theory and that if one country went fell communists,
that there would be a domino theory and the rest

(33:23):
of the world would go communists. They were actually afraid
that the world was going to turn into a communistic world.
So ideologically that's what they thought. Now on a purely
economic standpoint, you know, you make money, you go to war,
and in the military industrial complex, which by the way,

(33:44):
Eisenhower warned us beware, in the military industrial complex, they
want they want to be able to do that because
it's good business. So those two things are happening there.
And for young people, they're being sent off to war
to in a war that they don't believe is just
they don't believe is legal. And if you remember, I

(34:06):
mean people who want to study their history, there was
a thing called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was
all about the fact that we were told that our
ship was fired on in Vietnam in this Tonkin ship
was fired on and so I mean in the Gulf

(34:27):
of Tonkin, and that was the pretext for why we
went to war in Vietnam. So you had a lot
of distrust going on, and the country started divide. There
were protests all over the country, and we divided as
a nation. And I believe that it was the beginning
of the divide that you see now. This country couldn't

(34:48):
be more divided than they are now. And I would
point back to what happened in going into Vietnam. That
was the beginning of that divide.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Well, and there's so many things to talk about here
that branch from that. But we learn in your podcast
that JFK was maintaining maybe off the books, we would say,
contact with Soviet officials, like the highest Soviet officials and
Cuban officials, and attempting to smooth things out directly rather
than through the mechanisms that would normally you'd need to

(35:20):
go through to vice.

Speaker 5 (35:21):
Conversation back channel. He was back channeling with Kruse Jeff.
He was back channeling with Castro directly with Kruse Jeff
and Castro to make sure that and this is on
the heels of the Cuban missile crisis, which happened a
year after the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban missile crisis,
as people know, or you know, maybe they're learning for

(35:42):
the first time, was we were on the brink of
a nuclear war, and those of us who were alive
at the time will never ever forget it. We found
out that there were nuclear weapons in Cuba that were
put there by the Russians ninety miles away from America,
and they could reach Washington in twenty minutes. So we

(36:04):
were doing drills in school. Now they have active shooter drills.
In my time, they had a duck and covered drill
that you under the desk. You'd get under a desk
in case of a nuclear Now. I used to make
a joke about it, which is, you know, it was
a known fact that the material that they made school
desks out of could actually repel a nuclear bomb. But it's,

(36:28):
of course it's ridiculous. It's optics though, right, it's this
idea with safety, you know, yeah, that we better, you know,
keep ourselves safe. So we were all believing that that's
what we were a minute away from a nuclear holocaust,
and that was that was the basis fun, you know,
which we lived. So uh, he started the back channel.

(36:49):
He said, you know, we can't let this happen. What
can we do? They you know, he settled the Cuban
missile crisis, Kennedy did. He He made a deal with
Cruse Chef. We had missiles in Turkey. He said to
Kruse Chef, will take those missiles out of Turkey if
you take these missiles out of Cuba, which happened. But
then he said, from there on, we got to make

(37:10):
sure that nothing like this happens again, because the whole world.
We're going to blow up the whole world if we
do this. And so he started back channeling to Castro
to Kruse Chef and the CIA was well aware of that.
They became well aware of that, and that added to
their distrust of Kennedy in terms of his fight against communism.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
And also there seems to be this it was a
thing that the American public was largely unaware of, but
there was internal descent escalating into chaos. At the same time,
there was this move for de escalation.

Speaker 5 (37:51):
Yes, right right during the Cuban missile crisis. The hardliners
in both the CIA and the military were We're pushing
Kennedy like crazy, make a strike, take them out, take
those missiles out, go after them. And they were very
upset with him when he chose this this other path.

(38:12):
It was. It was contentious. There was a lot of screaming,
yelling going on in the White It's thirteen days, very
famous time, thirteen days where we all lived on the
edge of are we going to be blown up?

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Do you feel rob that there was a somewhat of
a of a like lack of respect amid the unelected
power structures of US governance, because from what we've been reading,
it seems as though when Kennedy enters office, you know,
the CIA still still high off the oss World War

(38:48):
two actions. They're kind of coming in with this attitude that, yes,
you will be a figurehead and you will do what
we the adults say.

Speaker 5 (38:58):
Is not only that, yeah, not only that. But Kennedy
campaigned in nineteen sixty as a anti communist, you know,
strong against communism. There was a big debate, you know,
with with Nixon. It was on television, was I think

(39:18):
it was one of the first televised debates, and he
had to show that he had real bona fides in
fighting communism. He ran as a anti communist, strong willed,
a guy who would stand, you know, in his inaugural desk,
We'll stand up to any foe, We'll fight anybody to
do this. And he knew in order to win he

(39:41):
had to show his strength against communism. But as the
realities presented himself, he realizes that that strength that he
showed could lead to world hundreds and hundreds of millions
of people being killed. And so the reality set in
and he said, no, I got a oh, a different,
a different direction here.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
And they were mad.

Speaker 5 (40:03):
They were angry at him because they assumed that he
was going to be a you know, a real, real
you know, as as an extension of the McCarthy days,
where go after the comedy, get him out of government,
get you know, anybody could be a comedy. They're lurking,
you know, get get rid of them. Uh, they thought
he was going to be one of those guys.

Speaker 2 (40:23):
That's a proper witch hunt, though not the way it's
kind of been dog whistle ified by the Trump administration.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
You know.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
That was people actually being persecuted who did not have
any affiliation.

Speaker 5 (40:31):
Yes, yes, a lot of them were.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah, yeah, And it makes me wonder about the just
real quick, the concept of greater good, which seems to
be you know, both an ideological motivating force for a
lot of the more hawkish factors here. And I have
to say, uh, one of the things that I went
back and rewatched after listening to the first several episodes

(40:57):
of Who Killed JFK? Was a you good men, and
there's you know, there's there's something there that reminds me
and probably a lot of our listeners too, reminds me
so viscerally of that rationalization where where we have characters
who are saying, look, did I do something quote unquote wrong? Maybe,

(41:20):
but I did it for the right reasons. Do you
feel do you feel that that was sort of a
common mentality in the Operation Ensure.

Speaker 5 (41:29):
I mean that is, you know, the military is there
to protect us, and that's good, we want that. But
the question is how far do you go to protect us?
Are you willing to commit war crimes? In the case
of Nazi Germany? Are you willing to do anything? And

(41:50):
that's what the character that Jack Nicholson plays in Few
Good Men. He says, you want me on that wall,
you need me on that wall. I'm doing what you
can't do. And so the question always is how far
are you willing to go in order to uh to
protect people? Are you willing to blow up the world?
I mean, who wins? Nobody wins in that situation. You're

(42:12):
not protecting anybody.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
And unfortunately, as just mere mortal voters, we don't get
to the side how far that line is? No, we don't, no, no.

Speaker 5 (42:23):
But what we're hoping is that we, as normal voters,
are electing people who have the good sense to know
where that line is, and that that's where we are now.
I mean, we're we couldn't be more divided. You've got
one guy who's willing to do anything, you know, Donald Trump,
is willing to do anything to keep power, and that

(42:46):
means he even said it. I'm not making it up.
He said it. We'll put the vermin you know, we'll
take and we'll put them in in in in camps,
and we'll make sure you're familiar with We'll get the blood,
you know, the disgusting the that's poisoning the American bloodstream,
will put him in camps. That's he said that.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
But he's also plagiarizing Adolf Hitler too, well, yeah, because
he can't make your stuff up.

Speaker 5 (43:12):
He's not smart enough. But I mean, and I always
heard that he had mine komf on his vin stand. Well,
he probably had it on his best name. He didn't
read it. I mean, I don't know how much of
you bred who knows. I don't know what he does
with reading.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
Mine from the Bible and he didn't read either of them.

Speaker 5 (43:28):
Yeah, right, he probably held mine comf. He held my
comf up the wrong way too. But guys, but we're
getting too far a field here. But the truth is,
we want to elect people who know where that line
is and not to cross it, because when you cross it,
you're not protecting people.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
You're also not electing a lot of the decision makers
to your point, directly and representative democracy.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
There's no one.

Speaker 1 (43:53):
No average voter votes for a Supreme Court nominee, No
average voter votes for the people in charge of the
NSSA or the CIA.

Speaker 5 (44:02):
No. But what you are voting for is you're voting
for a president who nominates Supreme Court justices, who nominates
a secretary of Defense, you know, any of the positions.
You're nominating somebody, or you're voting for somebody who has
the power to nominate people who are sensible, who know

(44:25):
where the line is. That's representative government, and that's what
you want. You want somebody who's reasoned, who's intelligent, and
who can make the right decisions.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Hey, let's take a quick pause here for a word
from our sponsor, and then we'll return with more from
Rob Reiner, and we're back. Let's jump right into our
conversation with Rob Reiner already in progress.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
Let's take it back to nineteen seventy five, to the
Church Committee again, because it's directly related to this. That's
when the American public learned about a couple of things
that you might be familiar with if you're listening to
this show MK Ultra and Cointelpro specifically when it comes
to assassinations. I'm thinking about Cointelpro. If you jump five
years after JFK's assassination and you look at Martin Luther

(45:17):
King Junior, you look at JFK's brother RFK, So it's like,
again not directly perhaps related to Cointelpro, but it is
a secret it is a secret thing that we didn't
know about, that the FBI was doing to investigate people
that they thought would be counter to the vision of
the world that they had.

Speaker 5 (45:37):
Right, that's right, that's right. And you mentioned it's counterintelligence program.
I mean, that's what they're doing. They're trying to root
out anybody that goes against their ideology. You mentioned Ultra.
MK Ultra was a program that was designed at the CIA,
and this was during the Cold War where there was
a lot of concern about moles infiltrating our intelligence community

(46:04):
and getting information, and we wanted to try to see
if we could get our people inside the you know,
the Soviet Union, inside the KGB. There was this big
cat and mouse game going on, headed up by this
head of counter intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who was a
brilliant guy, genius, but also paranoid beyond belief that he

(46:26):
thought there was, you know, a mole everywhere you look.
So this mk Ultra program was designed to try to
create spies, people who would look like, you know, dissidents
or whatever. And there was a program set up at
a place called Nag's Head and we'll get you'll get

(46:47):
into this. You'll hear this in the other episodes. It
was in North Carolina where they took disaffected youths, Oswald
being one of them. He was part of that program.
And we have somebody on the podcast who knew Oswald
in that program, who was there at Nashead. And what
they did was they used LSD. They used all kinds

(47:07):
of uh techniques of torture and things to try to uh,
you know, get inside somebody's mind. This was like in
the days of the Manchurian candidate, that you could create
this elusive illusion of somebody who was not who they
appeared to be. Now it didn't really work, they didn't
really were able to be successful. But the fact is

(47:30):
they were uh uh training people to be assets assets
for them that somewhere down the line they could could use.
And Oswald was part of that. Oswald was part of that.
He also went and learned Russian, He learned uh Rush Russian,
and he was sent to the Soviet Union as as

(47:50):
part of an operation to see if they could infiltrate
somebody into the into the uh you know, Toto, the
Soviet Union. It was a failure, he didn't get anything.
But we know that that happened because he was stationed
in Japan during you know, when he was a marine.
He was you know, a radar operator for the U

(48:13):
two spy plane. And there was a guy who was
also in military intelligence that was teamed up with Oswald
on an operation to try to flip a Soviet colonel
to come into the CIA. So Oswald was part of
an intelligence community. We knew that that. And once he
went to Russia in nineteen fifty nine sixty, around sixty

(48:39):
to fifty on sixty they opened a file on Oswald,
but they call it two to one file. And for
four years they had reams and reams of documents connecting
the CIA with Oswald, and none of that came out
in the Warrant Commission report. That Warren report said there's
no there's no connect We don't know anything about Oswald,

(49:02):
and there were thousands of documents that showed that they did.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
That's what I was going to ask, because there's no
acknowledgment that he was an asset or a reference to
who his handlers might have been, or he was just
a lone wolf. He was treated like a civilian who
just went nuts and did this thing of his own volition.

Speaker 5 (49:18):
Well, it's interesting, you know you said he said I
was just a patsy. I was a patsy. Now, you know,
if you're accused of murder, the first thing you're saying
is I didn't do it. I don't know, I didn't
do it. You're not saying I'm a patsy. A patsy
is a guy who knows that something else is going on,
that he's being set up for. And then when you

(49:39):
add people ask, well, well didn't he want to you know,
he was a lone wolf and didn't he want to
make a name for himself. Well, if you want to
make a name for yourself, you say what you did.
You don't say I'm a patsy. You say I did
it because I believe America.

Speaker 2 (49:53):
You know you do, you know you do that.

Speaker 5 (49:55):
It's the exact opposite.

Speaker 3 (49:57):
Okay, I've read some things and have heard something that
Oswald was potentially meeting with a group of Cuban exiles
in Dallas right before the assassination. Did you find anything
that may corroborate that.

Speaker 5 (50:11):
No, we didn't find that he was meeting with a
group of Cuban exiles. What we did find was that
it's known, this is on record that he went to
New Orleans a few months in April May. He went
to New Orleans and he joined what they call the
fair Play for Cuba Committee. Now that was a legitimate organization.

(50:33):
They had chapters around the country, but when he went
to New Orleans, he started his own chapter. And he
was the only member of the fair Play for Cuba Committee.
There was no other members. He was the only one,
and he handed out leaflets. And if this is something
we know because we have photographs. In one of the

(50:54):
pictures he's handing out leaflets and there's a CIA operative
in the background of one of those photographs. Now, the
other thing is when he handed out these photographs, it
was done at a place where there were uh anti
Castro people. He was supposed to be pro cast a
lot of anti Castro and there was a big fight.
They took his leafless, they threw up in the air,

(51:15):
there was a scuffle, there was a melee and was
all caught on on on film. I mean they they
they and it went on the news. So who's you know,
who's filming this, who's doing this? I mean, you have
to make it so that you're you know, setting up
this guy that he's a pro castro guy and uh,
you know, otherwise he's just a lone guy sitting on

(51:37):
the corner handing out leafless. You know who go who
films the guy handing out leafless at any corner anywhere?

Speaker 3 (51:47):
The narrative somebody making a movie.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
Yeah, there's a bit of a there's there's this emphasis
kind of on narrative and even in the even in
the internal conversations which are now public knowledge regarding the
Warren Commission, we see that there is this strong drive
from people who are kind of driving the commission, even

(52:10):
though they're not official members. I believe it was Jagger Hoover,
famous dude who said, look, we're going to make this
look like this story.

Speaker 5 (52:22):
And yeah, you had you had not only Jaye Go Hoover,
but you know, we have audio tapes of Hoover talking
to Johnson saying, we can't let this thing get out
of hand. The House wants to investigated, the Senate wants
to investigated, but we got to keep a lid on
this thing because it's it's going to go crazy, so
we have to control it. And then there's a very

(52:45):
famous memo by Nicholas Kotzenbach. He was the deputy Attorney
General under Robert Kennedy, and he released a memo saying,
we have to convince the public that Lee Harvey Oswall
was the Loan assassin. And this came out three days
or a few days right after the assassination, and they

(53:05):
were already saying this is Oswal, and we got to
make the public believe this. So everything was designed to
create that narrative, like you said, and we get into
it in the third episode where we get into the
forensics of how the narrative really starts to fall apart.
It really falls apart because we get into the famous

(53:26):
single bullet theory and they had a big problem. I mean,
people who study this stuff know it's impossible to do
what this one bullet was supposed to have done. And
for your listeners who don't know about it. The Warrant

(53:46):
Commission said that three shots were fired from the sixth
floor of the Texas school Book Depository building, which overlooked
the Presidential motikaide on Elm Street. Three shots. Initially they
said the first shot hit Kennedy and in the back
the second shot. They had a problem because they said

(54:08):
all three shots hit. The problem they had was the
first shot missed. And they found out that the first
shot missed because it hit a curb and a piece
of concrete flicked into a bystander's cheek and he started
to bleed. So now they were left with two shots,
and that two shots had to do all the damage.
One of the shots we know was a shot to

(54:29):
his head. That was the fatal head wound, the shot
that killed Kennedy. Then they have one bullet left to
say that a bullet went into from the sixth floor.
From the sixth floor, the bullet went into the Kennedy's
back right six to eight inches below his neck, then

(54:49):
traveled up and came out his neck. Then made a
turn to the Magic Connolly. Hit Connolly in the ribs,
break some ribs, then makes another turn hits him in
the wrists, breaks the wrist bones, then makes another turn
and and it winds up in his thigh. That's what
they had to make you believe. And the guy who

(55:10):
came up with that was a fellow named Marlinspector who
became a senator. At the time, he was just a
lawyer who was representing the committee, and he came up
with this single bullet theory, this magic bullet that did
all that damage. And they said, well, that's what And
by the way, you can see that bullet. It's on
file in the in the archives and in the Warrant Commission,

(55:33):
and it's limited as evidence number three ninety nine, and
it's pristine. It didn't just looks like it didn't hit anything.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
You know, rub should we maybe take this as an
opportunity to address the elephant in the room That seems
to me it should be a larger elephant, but it
seems to have us have been glossed over by the
media a bit. Paul Landis, Oh, yeah, well that's revelations.

Speaker 5 (55:54):
Yeah. See, that's interesting you bring up, Paul Landis, because
again it goes back to drips and things coming out
over a time. If people Paul Anders came out with
a report about I don't know, a couple of months
ago whatever, and we interviewed him for the podcast. Yeah,
he's on there. And this guy was on the trail car.

(56:20):
He was a secret service aation who was in the trailcar.
He's riding on the running board behind Kennedy when the
headshot came. He talks about how brain matter and the
skull matter flew in his direction and he had a
duck to get out of the way of getting hit
by brain matter. And he talked about how when they
got to Parkland Hospital, which is where they're going to

(56:42):
take care of Kennedy, that when he helped Jackie Kennedy
up out of the seat, there was a blood pool
of blood on the seat where they were sitting, and
he looked in the back on the top of the
seat resting there was a bullet and it was this
bullet and he didn't know what to do because he thought, well,
this is a piece of evidence, and it was. He

(57:04):
knew the bullet had been fired because it had striation
marks on it, but it was essentially pristine, there was
no other damage to it. And he picked it up
because he thought, you know, it's a piece of evidence.
What if somebody takes it and you know, and then
he went into the hospital and didn't know what to do,
and he put it on the Kennedy's by Kennedy's leg

(57:26):
when he was being worked on. And so when you
hear this and you take it not in context, you go, well,
so what there was another bullet there? But what you
have to know is that this is the bullet that
Arl Inspector claimed to have gone through two people. Now,

(57:46):
if that happened, then how how did the bullet wind
up in the back but it bounced back after it wounded?
You know what I mean? According is so crazy that
unless you can put all these pieces together, you go, well,
so the guy found a bullet, big deal.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
And what would the American public have done? There's another
question we can't answer. What would the American public have
done in the sixties had they known these and other discrepancies?
You know, Rob entering into this, we knew there was
a lot of stuff that we wouldn't get to in
our conversation, like the autopsy reports, uh, the one that
got birds. Yeah, the fact that Texas Governor Coddoley also said,

(58:30):
I don't think that was the same bullet.

Speaker 5 (58:32):
No, he said that he died. He said the bullet
that Kennedy did not hit me. What would the public
have done. I think they were worried what the public
would have done, because it would have put I mean,
as it is, we have distrust in government now. The
trust level in government is so low now that I
think that at that time, it would have, you know,

(58:53):
just blown the lid off of any trust of the
Justice Department, the intelligence community, the military. You know, they
were trying to keep a lid on that so that
they you know, that trust remained in government. But my
contention is you trust when you know. And if you
know the truth and you're open and telling the truth,

(59:14):
you can say, hey, we made a mistake, we did
something wrong, we should not have done that. And if
you do that, you gain trust, you don't lose trust.
And then that's what we need the basis of all democracy.
And that's why I've stuck with this for so long.
I believe that that the foundation of a strong democracy
is that the American people trust in the institutions of government.

(59:38):
We have to trust and by the way, people desputs
know the best way to gain power is to fomote
foment distrust and that's what Trump's been doing it. It's
right out of the authoritarian playbook. You make people distrust
things and then you say I can fix it. I'm
the only one that can fix it.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
This goes to one of the I think the big questions,
and I can't speak for everyone, but this is after
listening to the show and just the caliber the level
of research and investigation that you have done here. One
of one of my big questions is why now, like,
why this moment in time do we get the answer

(01:00:21):
for who killed JFK.

Speaker 5 (01:00:23):
Well, I think again, it goes back to right now,
we're seeing the potential end of American democracy and if
people don't think that that could happen, we're seeing it
right now unfold in front of our very eyes. And
what we need to do is be honest and truthful

(01:00:45):
with the American public. We have a lot of things
that we've done wrong in this country, you know, starting
with what we did to Native Americans, then what we
did to black people who were slaves for so many
hundred years, and we have to come to grips with
all this stuff in order to make a more perfect union.

(01:01:06):
The people who started this country, they weren't. You know,
they didn't know everything they you know, Jefferson had slave,
they had slaves. But they did provide us with a
working document that could make us better, that we could
keep doing what we need to do to make us
better to form a more perfect union. So we have

(01:01:30):
this opportunity, and the only way we're going to forge
a more perfect union is to level with people to
say this is the truth, this is true, and this
is not true. And we're living at a time where
it's very, very hard to get the truth out because
we're loaded with disinformation. You know. You see on TikTok

(01:01:51):
they come out with all of a sudden, ben Laden
is saying something and it's amplified on TikTok, and then
everybody jumps on that, and you go, oh, no, that's
not right. You don't kill people because you don't believe
in their ideology or you don't like Jews, or you
don't like Muslims, or you don't like black people whatever.

(01:02:11):
That's not making it a more perfect union. So that's
why we want to do this. We want to put
try to keep putting us back on.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
The right track. You know, it's funny Rob that like
my kid is fifteen and just an absolute product of
the Internet, much more than any other generation, where it
was a fully formed thing by the time they, you know,
were of age and just using it from as early
as they can remember. But my kid very much understands
the idea of vetting information that they're presented with, you know,

(01:02:39):
the idea of being the arbiter of good information well
time people.

Speaker 5 (01:02:45):
True, hats off to your kid, man, because most kids,
from what I understand, and I just was at the
symposium where they talked about the dangers of AI and
the genius say, you are working on AI. They don't
know how to control it. They don't have the single
foggiest idea of how to regulate it. And what they

(01:03:06):
say is a lot of young people will look at
something informationally on on social media. They'll read the headline
and then they'll go to the comments. I was hoping.

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
Of the generation. Yeah maybe it's maybe it's not. Maybe
my kid is no similar their peers.

Speaker 5 (01:03:25):
But well, I mean thinking, you know, like I say,
hats off to your kid, because I mean, if he's
really you know, studying this and figuring in trying to
figure out what's true and what's not true, then hats
off to them.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
I was just hoping that it was maybe indicative of
the generation, but your research seems to say otherwise. But
who knows. You know, every individual is different.

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
So yeah, yeah, Hey guys, I just want to articulate
to everybody listening into you, Rob, why I am so
excited that you are one of the minds behind this project.
And it has to do with how your brain functions
because of what because of the way it's functioned in
the past, simultaneously focused on the macro and the micro.

(01:04:03):
Just see if I can get this out so I
can ask you the question. So if you go back
to the fall of nineteen ninety one and you put
yourself on that bridge when you began filming a few
good men. If you're you are overseeing the creative vision
of this project, so that means like having that overview

(01:04:23):
feel right while micro not micromanaging, but keeping yourself focused
on the micro thousands of decisions that go into getting
one shot right. But you're also a producer on that project,
which means you are getting to see kind of the
stuff that happens behind the scenes that allows the filming
to begin. Even how do you think those experiences over

(01:04:47):
all of these years shape the way that you've looked
at this assassination as some kind of set of machinations.

Speaker 5 (01:04:54):
Potentially, you know that that's a perfect summation of how
I approach things. It's exactly how I do it. You know,
as a director, I do have to see the overall
big picture. I have to see what that looks like.
And at the same time, I know that these little
specific details are what make up that big picture. So

(01:05:15):
you look at it and you say, does that make sense?
Does that not make sense? I'm somebody who I love puzzles.
I like to do puzzles. I like to figure out
how does something work, how do those pieces fit together.
I'm not just jigsaw puzzles with crosswords and Sudoku and
all of those kinds of things. So I do look

(01:05:36):
at things in a macro way, but then I also
look to individual little fine points and does that make sense?
Does that fit? Does that piece fit into that puzzle?
Or is that And maybe it does, and they maybe
the puzzle goes in a different direction. A lot of
times you look at something and you have a certain
predisposed idea as to what something will be, but then

(01:05:59):
all of a sudden, the thing will tell you that
it isn't that it's something else, and then you have
to be open minded enough to go down the road
of where that's leading you. And so you go down
all these rabbit trails to find out what and then
eventually the puzzle comes into shape and you see what
it really is. And I've been at this particular puzzle

(01:06:24):
for sixty years, and it wasn't until I met a
number of different people who started filling in pieces and
certain things that I thought, hmmm, that's not maybe true.
But then when I started putting it all together with
all the information that I had, I went, Okay, I
get this now when we lay it out at the

(01:06:45):
end of this podcast, I can't tell you one hundred
percent for sure that these were the four shooters and
that these were the four positions we're in. I just
gave something away spoil or alert. But I can tell
you the best educated guests, based on all the information
that's been provided, the one thing I know one hundred

(01:07:08):
percent for sure it was a conspiracy. There's no question
about that. There is no question about that this man
Learvy Oswell did not do what they said he did.
Did not happen that I know for a fact. Other
than that exactly how it was put together. I can

(01:07:29):
offer you what I think happened, and then you know,
we hopefully it'll spawn more discussion.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
And that I think is our button, that is that
is leading us to the rest of the story. Rob,
thank you so much for your time. We're not blowing
smoke when we say that this truly is, at least
in my opinion, a top notch, top caliber investigation, connecting

(01:07:58):
things in a way that they have not been connected
did before to the point about puzzles, and you're taking
on this herculean task right of unraveling an official narrative
that was forced upon the American and global public for
more than half a century, interrogating claims that have, for
so often and for so long not been given the

(01:08:20):
scrutiny that they deserve. We are, as we said earlier,
right there with everybody listening. We're tuning in as you
answer the question who killed JFK? And you know, usually
at the end of these conversations we ask a question
that feels kind of odd to ask a creator of

(01:08:42):
your stature, but where.

Speaker 5 (01:08:44):
What's your favorite color? What's your favorite color? What are icebreakers?

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
What is is there?

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
I guess the way to to make this a little
more bespoke is, sir, is there a way for people
to reach out to you and your team if they,
like Paul Landis, have additional information that might help us out.

Speaker 5 (01:09:06):
I mean, we we it's it's you know, it came
out through it's being released through iHeartRadio, and there's a
team there that can field information. Listen. By the way,
I'm seventy six years old, and you know, I'm the last,
maybe the last generation alive that will present this, and
I'm sure that there's going to be a lot more

(01:09:27):
information down the road that's going to come out. Like
I say, almost five thousand documents are still being witheld,
so we I'm hoping that we can keep this alive
long enough for all of us to find out the
exact truth.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
I gotta add really quickly, it looks like you're the
exact same age as Stephen King. This obviously loomed very
large for him as well. Yeah, eleven sixty three. You know,
we talked about comedians and satirists and science fiction and stuff,
so many amazing ways that folks like that, who maybe
you wouldn't immediately think can really shed light on this stuff.
I learned a lot of the stuff from that book,

(01:10:02):
and a lot of it is historically accurate. Of course
it's a work of fiction, but you know the yeah,
same exact day, So no wonder this is something that
has been on his mind in the same way. Yeah
maybe if.

Speaker 5 (01:10:11):
You're eleven, But you never ever, ever will forget that
where you that moment and how it affected you. It won't.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
It doesn't get to stand by me too, didn't you?
Did he direct stand by me? Well?

Speaker 5 (01:10:22):
I did direct stand by me. I also directed misery,
which is a stand.

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
And you're so boried in your output. I got forget sometimes.

Speaker 5 (01:10:31):
Castle Rock. We did seven Stephen King books.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
Yep, we didn't even talk about LBJ from twenty sixteen
and incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:10:39):
Yeah, we also talk about oh so many things, the
conversations LBJ had in the wake of things Hoover. The
list goes on and on, and we're telling you, folks,
the best way to get these answers. Anytime you were
hearing this conversation and you think, oh, Robin, the guys
didn't get to the point, we promise you tune in

(01:11:02):
to who killed JFK. And let's keep to your point,
mister Riiner. Let's keep the story alive every Wednesday. You
know what a time, folks. We are super excited about
who killed JFK. It really is as they said earlier,
it really is a top notch investigation. And my only

(01:11:24):
regret is that we didn't get to everything. But I
am pretty confident that Robin Solidad are going to get
to most things in this one.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
Oh yeah, the level of detail in that show is astounding.
You know, it's a weird line. Sometimes when we do
an episode like this, we're promoted, like in a way
promoting a show, right, but we're just having a conversation
with someone talking about these topics. But just this show man,
it's intense.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
And also just to have someone who's as much of
a legend as Rob is, and I think we're all
fans of various facets of his work, and you know,
it's one person who you can truly say as a
gentleman and a scholar and a legendary director and humanitarian
and just an overall good guy. I think we were
all blown away by his candor and generosity and just wow,

(01:12:14):
I'm still kind of reeling from.

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
That, and as Rob would say, the puzzle continues, the
mystery unfolds. He gave us some light spoilers. We would
like to hear your thoughts, folks on what they rightly
call the greatest murder mystery in the history of the
United States. Let us know. We try to be easy

(01:12:35):
to find online.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
That's right. You can find this at the handle conspiracy
Stuff on x FKA, Twitter, YouTube, and also on Facebook
where we have our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy.
Join in on the conversation there. If you wish, on
TikTok and Instagram, you can find us at the handle
conspiracy Stuff Show. But wait, there's more.

Speaker 3 (01:12:55):
Oh, there's more. Hey on the YouTube front, if you
maybe subscribe to it a long time ago, make sure
you head over there again and you put alerts on
basically because there's gonna be a ton of stuff coming
there in the near future, so just keep a lookout.
If you want to call us, we also have a
phone number. It's one eight three three std WYTK and

(01:13:18):
when you call in you leave a voicemail. You get
three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname and say whatever
you'd like. Just please let us know if We can
use your name and voice on one of our listener
mail episodes, and hey, if you want to send us
other things, links, all kinds of good stuff, you can
also send us an email.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
We read every single email we get. Where we are
conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
Stuff they don't.

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
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