JFK Assassination - Dr. Daryl Carter

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
As everyone knows, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Assassination of President John M. Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
And it's a moment that stared into most americans lives,
whether or not they were whether or not they were
living at the time. So that's what I'm going to
talk about, his assassination, his life, his career, his presidency,
and of course the legacy of both his administration but

(00:29):
also the assassination and after his words and give the
best answers I also came.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
So let me go ahead and again fifty years ago
to no.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
President Kennedy was in Texas campaigning, trying to mend party
fences with the Texas State Democrats. As he traveled around,
began to travel around tech in places like Houston and
San Antonio. The next day he will go to excuse me.

(01:06):
Late that night, he will go to Fort Worth, followed
by Dallas and dinning down to Austin and Johnson City,
where the LBJ ranch is located, and in fact it's
still there today. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May
twenty ninth, nineteen seventeen, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Joseph and

(01:30):
Rose Kennedy, the second of nine children. Kennedy grew up
in the rarefied atmosphere of the American elite. Jack Kennedy
enjoyed the best of what money could provide, fine food,
fine clothes, servants, the best education, multiple homes in Hyannas, Boston,

(01:52):
New York, and Palm Beach. Despite his privileged upbringing, Kennedy
was also in a family that was Irish and Roman Catholic,
and this is an important part of his political makeup
as well as his personal makeup of who he actually was,
because it guided not only the family relations, but it

(02:14):
guided his political relations with the country. And that Irish
Catholicism that was a part of the Kennedy family so
much a part of it also presented great difficulties as
he got older and began to pursue a political career actively.
And it was his upbringing as well as the being

(02:35):
the descendant, if you will, of very poor Irish men
and women who had come over originally because of the
Potato famine in the eighteen forties. This informed his worldview
and it colored his opinion about the times in which
he lived. At home, Kennedy learned values not just Irish

(02:57):
or Catholic, but learned values that would define his life,
his career, and more broadly, the success the political success
of the Kennedy family. He was the son of Joseph P. Kennedy,
the son of a local ward boss, banker, businessman, tavern
owner PJ. Kennedy, and he graduated from Harvard in nineteen twelve. Now,

(03:18):
I want to, just for a moment here get you
to understand how difficult that was. In the early twentieth century,
outside of the South, the ethnic.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Group that was the most.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Looked down upon was the Irish, and as late as
the eighteen nineties, irishmen in Boston could still find signs
saying no Irish need apply so that Kennedy, the elder
Kennedy could go to Harvard University, the school of the elite,
the school of the Protestant elite. In the United States,

(03:57):
the social Register Families was particularly noteworthy and particularly important,
and it was there that the elder Kennedy began to
really formulate not just his own ambition, but his own
petty grievances, if you will, that weren't so petty to him,
especially the prejudice that he felt at Harvard, not being
allowed into the elite social clubs of the university being

(04:20):
looked down upon by the scions of New England's most
famous and wealthy families. And it's something that guided not
only his own career in business and his short career
in government, but it's something that he passed down to
each one of his children, that idea that not only
do we have to strive and work hard and be ambitious,
but that idea as well that hey, we've got a

(04:45):
score to settle here. And you see this most prominently
in the nineteen fifty two campaign when he takes on
arguably the most prominent of those Boston Brahmins or the
elite of Boston and Henry Cabot lodge.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
A.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
He became a bank president, became a stockbroker, became a
movie mogul, and a Wall Street operator. Him in fact,
he made tens of millions of dollars during the nineteen twenties,
most infamously during the Great Depression, or so let me
rephrase that, the crash of nineteen twenty nine. Not only
was he a multi millionaire, but he played off the

(05:23):
connections that he had made up during his young life
and the fact that he had married a woman who
was the popular daughter of the legendary mayor John Honey
fitz Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald himself had been a congressman, he
had been a mayor, he had been in the State House.
He was a willer and dealer, the type of quote

(05:44):
unquote stereotypical Boston Irish politician that so many people think
of today, and of course at the time, it was
Joe seniors impression, excuse me, ambition and drive that made
the Kennedy family wealthy. It made it powerful, it made

(06:05):
it successful, and it made it noteworthy. So when you
hear talk, for example, of Rose Kennedy, who played an
important role in her own right in terms of good
manners and education and history and those types of things understanding,
it was Joe Kennedy who was, as Ted Kennedy would
later say, the blowtorch, if you will, on the family.

(06:25):
Wanting to have seats in public office, wanting to have
wealth and power, and to be able to really control
not only your own destiny, but to play a major
role in controlling the destiny of others. And power and
control was essential part of Joe Kennedy. And just a

(06:47):
few examples of how he exerted that control what that
control looked like. He went even so far as to
discreetly inquire as to his children's bathroom habits. Were they regular?
I mean, he wanted to know everything about his children.
And the one area in which Joe and Rose did

(07:10):
have something in common beyond that early childhood puppy love,
was that they were both wanting to be accepted by
the elite. By the elite, and Jack Kennedy, as a
result of that, becomes this one person said, more Brahmin
than the Brahmins, okay, and I thought.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Come on in, guys, have a seat. Welcome.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
So those shared interest in promoting the family guides not
just Joe and Rose, but it's also passed down into
the children. Jack Kennedy's early life was spent usually in beds,
hospital beds, infirmaries in Boston, at the Mayo Clinic in
New York and other places, because he was very sickly child,
and he caught every disease he's imageable, you know, from

(08:01):
chicken pox, you know, and whooping cough, measles, you name it.
He had it, scarlet favor. He almost died from me.
That was one of the first times he had The
last writes A minister to him by a Catholic priest.
Some people tend to think that that day in Dallas
was the first time. No, there were several times before
that because of his poor health. So Kennedy as a

(08:24):
child develops this image excuse me, develops a self image
of a kind of a hero, right, And he reads
and reads and reads. He fills up his time with
books and magazine articles about heroes, about generals, about politicians,
about statesmen, and it gives him an extraordinary, an extraordinary

(08:45):
fantasy life, if you will. And because of the sickness,
it also tells him that it gives him a fatalistic
view of the world and that he has to accomplish
something beyond that because of his sickliness, because of the
wealth and the privilege, he also develops a really arrogant demeanor,
if you will, the I did it. I can do

(09:07):
anything because Joe Kennedy told me I could, and I'm
mc kennedy, and that's the way it works. So he
develops also at this time a disdain for authority. He
doesn't like the principles and the headmasters at his private
schools in New England. He doesn't like to deal with
anybody who's in charge. He wants to be in charge.

(09:28):
And he's always fighting against his older brother, who's kind
of the model child in the house.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Joe Jr.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Who's handsome, who's tall, who's healthy, someone that Jack, as
his sister said, just had to run like hell to
keep up with. So Kennedy spends his early childhood really
in that shadow, with these Irish Catholic values, with this
ambition and his desire to become a part of the elite,
to become acceptable by what Rose Kennedy called the nice

(09:55):
people of Boston, and by the nineteen thirties, he gets
his own opportunity in the mid thirties to go to
Harvard University, where his brother is also a student, and
at Harvard by the time of his sophomore year. At
the end of his sophomore year, he becomes a very
serious student for the very first time. He was always bright,
but he was aloof He loved to read, and he

(10:15):
was well read, but he didn't pay a whole lot
of attention to school work. It was a little too
structured in some ways for him. In fact, you can
go on the Kennedy Library website today and you will
find his transcripts from when he was applying to Harvard,
And these are c's and d's. And you know how

(10:36):
did he get in there? Well, he was a legacy.
His daddy helped get him in at a time where
legacies were far more prominent fixture of American higher education
than they are sa today. It Harvard, he too remained sick.
Yet he begins to think about foreign policy. And at

(11:01):
the same time that he's thinking about foreign policy, what
is happening across the globe. The Nazis are on the
march right, They're going across Europe. They're beginning not only
re armed, but to take back land that they claim
rightfully belongs to them because of the Germanic people that

(11:23):
are located there. Japan is doing what they're involved in,
their imperialism and their militarism in the Southwest, excuse me,
the South Pacific, as well as Asia and places like
Korea and China and all those islands out there in
the South Pacific. So he's dealing with the world it's
rapidly changing. He's dealing with the world and observing a

(11:44):
world that is becoming increasingly dangerous. And in the twenty
years since the end of World War One, it's become
far more sophisticated when it comes to military technology and
the use of weapons. So when he graduated in nineteen
forty from Harvard, he understands clearly that not only is

(12:06):
Britain at war now, not only is France going to
be conquered, but the United States is going to have
to participate. So his senior thesis is called Why England
Slept And it's a book that, arguably, if it had
not been for his father and his wealth and privilege
and the fact that at the time his father was
ambassador to the Court of Saint James, would have never

(12:29):
been published. But it was published, and his young twenty
something year old kid now has a reputation as a
foreign policy expert.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
It is extraordinary.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
It's like taking my twelve year old and making her
an expert on something. It just doesn't seem right, but
it was right at the time, and people bought into it.
The other thing that he does is he enlists in
the military. Okay, he becomes an officer in the United
States Navy, just like his brotherhood enlisted as well around
the same time. Now, he did this for a couple

(12:59):
of reasons because the war was coming, he wanted to
be a part of the action. There was a sense
of deep patriotism about what an American male should be
doing in a time of war. But it was also
because Joe Kennedy refused to serve in the First World War,
in essence hiding in part behind his family, but also

(13:20):
hiding in business, claiming that he was really helping the
war effort by making ships in Fall River, Massachusetts. And
so it was stinging or that stigma that was attached
to Joe Kennedy that had never really been forgotten, combined
with JFK's own feelings about the war and patriotism, and

(13:41):
lastly the fact that by nineteen forty Joe Kennedy is
widely considered an appeaser, a Nazi sympathizer, somebody who is
doing everything he can to keep America out of the war.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
He does not seem to.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
Grasp the moral issue at play here, especially as it
relates to Jews that are already being persecuted. Camps are
already under construction and beginning in Europe, and he basically says,
you know that they brought it on themselves. And this
is after he knows some of the horrific stories that
are coming out of Germany. So Joe Kennedy's own reputation

(14:20):
helps the spur his boys in. There is an effort
to you know, protect a family name, to protect a
Kennedy name. So both boys are involved by the fall
of nineteen forty one, before Pearl Harbor. But once Pearl
Harbor takes place, then everything changes. Now all the isolationism
from Johnson City, the California and everywhere else has gone.

(14:44):
Now it's about internationalism, which Roosevelt had been trying to
achieve for several years now unsuccessfully. Now it's about gearing
up that great war machine that Arsenal and democracy and
American production and industrial ca capability, And the Kennedy boys
are right in the thick of it.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
Now.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Joe Junior is going to go to England and spend
a great deal of his time there during the war.
He would unfortunately pass away in August of nineteen forty four.
But JFK himself, who had originally been assigned to an
intelligence division in Washington, tried as hard as he could
to get placed on combat duty in the South Pacific

(15:28):
and what kind of combat duty would be available to him.
This is a man who was sickly, who had a
bad back, who had one leg that was longer than
the other, who couldn't pass a medical exam until his
father paid for somebody to pass him. So he gets
a job where he is in charge one of the
rare jobs for a junior officer, that of a PT

(15:50):
boat commander. Okay, he gets his own ship with around
twenty people on it, because if he had gone anywhere
else in the South Pacific had been another line off
sir within the United States Navy, on some type of
ship or battleship or destroyer or something like that, answering
to somebody else. But on those PT boats, which were cheap,

(16:12):
which were fast, which were dangerous, he was able to
take charge of his own of his own ship, and
it gave him a great deal of satisfaction to be
able to not only be in the Navy, which he
considered more elite than the other branches, but it also
gave him the ability to work within the system yet

(16:33):
be somewhat outside of it. And this is a mainstay
of his entire careers, working outside that system. So on
a patrol one night in August of nineteen forty three,
Kennedy is patrolling a Blackett strike Okay and his pet
boat is cut in half by Japanese destroyer and Kennedy

(16:57):
suddenly finds himself in the middle of the pitch black
South Pacific night, floating in the water with his other crewmates.
The ship is destroyed, hanging on to the ruins that
stay afloat. His back is now badly damaged again. He's
got a couple of crew members who are dead, he's

(17:17):
got another one that he needs to save, and he
takes the time there to really, for the first time,
prove his metal under fire if he will, And he
does this by leading his men to a very long
swim several miles to what can only be called just
a little island. And he does this with one man

(17:38):
on his back who had been badly burned. And he
spends the rest of those next couple days going around
these islands and swimming back and forth looking for help.
And he finally comes across a couple of natives cars
a message in a coconut and it was taken to
friendlies on on a close close by island.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
He is rescued.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
He's immediately put in the infirmary uh their investigations they're
going to be taking place, because, after all, if you're
a naval navy skipper, uh, you have one job, keep
your damn boat.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
And he lost his boat.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
So what happened there, uh, Well, Joe Kennedy became involved,
and the fact that his own uh uh quick action
his courage in that particular moment helped as well, but
also his father making sure there's not going to be
an investigation. But what happens is he gets awarded a medal,
the prestigious naval medal. On top of that, he becomes

(18:41):
a national story, being the son of the now former
ambassador at court to Saint James so Peyton. Newspapers from
Boston to Los Angeles are all caring this story about
the heroic Kennedy boy who is cheated death if you will,
who's escaped and saved his crew. Readers Digest does a

(19:01):
story on it, other newspapers do stories on it, and
he becomes quite the hero. His brother, Joe Jr. Is
watching this and the night that they have a celebration
for him. When he finally gets back to Hyannas, which
is on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. As the party is

(19:23):
going on, Joe Jr. Walks upstairs crying, not because his
brother's safe, but because his brother has a more prestigious
metal for him. He was going to be president, and
you know, how dare young Jack do this to me?
And he writes a series of biding letters back and
forth to Jack Kennedy, telling them, you know, in essence,
you know I'm going to come back with a metal more.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Prestigious than you.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Kennedy spends most of the Reindeer of his time into
forty five on medical leave in the Navy, but he
also takes note of what he observed in the South
Pacific about the folly of admirals in general and those
who are part of the military brass and how they
make decisions often in his opinion, without consideration of the consequences,

(20:10):
and how that can affect people. And this will become
very important about twenty years when he's president and he's
dealing with issues such as the Cold War and the
Cuban missile crisis in Vietnam and Cuba and Latin American
all those types of things. After the death of his
brother just a year later in August of forty four,

(20:31):
Kennedy makes the reluctant decision in some respects to become
a political candidate himself. Many have said that he had
to do because Joe Junior died and Joe Junior was
supposed to be a politician. It's more complicated than that,
It's one historian is remarked, you know, he saw the
pain that his father was going through, the deep, unyielding

(20:57):
depression that his father was suffering. He understood that he
couldn't be his brother. He already had his own interest
in politics. But this is kind of his own way
getting both the cake and to be able to eat
it too. He wants to go into it, he's interested

(21:18):
in it, and at the same time this is a
way to draw him closer to Joe Senior and help
him relieve some of his pain. So by nineteen forty six,
the Kennedy family is looking eagerly at where Jack can run,
Where can he run for office? And you have a
congressman by the name of James Michael Curly, who's the

(21:38):
legendary Boston mayor in his own right. There's a book
wrote about him called The Last Raw stereotypical in the
negative sense of Irish politicians, although except with Curly, it
was absolutely true. He's corrupt, he's taking kickbacks, he's getting
wealthy off of his office. He's already gone to jail

(22:00):
these types of things. And he's still popular because he
takes on the Brahmins. But Kennedy helps to convince him,
you know, you need to open up the eleventh Congressional
District seat that you're holding and will help you become
mayor and all this kind of stuff. And this is
Kennedy willing and dealing in Boston, the elder Kennedy, and
he does just that. He relinquishes his office. Kennedy quickly

(22:21):
jumps in. Now understand, the eleventh Progressional District is in Cambridge,
and it's in some other areas and this is often
a working class area. Okay, he had never lived in
the district before. He didn't know the district whatsoever. He
had some friends who were in the district or came

(22:42):
from the district, but it is something that was completely
alien to him. He really was a carpetbagger. But he
jumps in the race anyways, and he's talking about this
new generation. You know, a new generation is now here
and it's ready to lead. And the Kennedy's flood the
district with money. Okay, they in a way that is

(23:04):
unprecedented in American politics. Tip O'Neill, the fame speaker to
how some of you may remember him from the nineteen eighties,
Tip O'Neill at the time was the state legislator, said
I didn't think he had a chance in hell. He
was sickly, he looked yellow, you know, I mean, how
could this kid possibly have anything? And what Kennedy realized

(23:26):
was that people were looking for inspiration. They were looking
for somebody knew. They were looking for somebody that was
not just another poll. And so they do a number
of new things, not just the quantity of money that
is brought into the district, but modern polling. They bring
to the district who's winning on any given day. How

(23:47):
many of you seen, just to say, last year in
the presidential election, there's a new poll every day, right,
Mom and pop poll shows Barack Obama leading, you know,
I mean, there's a new poll. But this is unheard of.
At the time, he's sending formal letters in envelopes to
the residents of the district. His father is printed up
hundreds of thousands of copies of readers digest and his

(24:10):
story in the Pacific because he's running in part as
a veteran. When you go to the mailbox today, we
may complain about the cost of a stamp, but this
is really expensive in nineteen forty six to be sending
out you may send out a penny postcard, but you
didn't send out letters because nobody could afford it. But
the Kennedys could. Beyond that, they rigged the process by

(24:31):
putting on a janitor who had a similar name to
one of the other official candidates, putting him on the
ballot because in nineteen forty six, you don't have twenty
four hour news, you don't have the Internet, you don't
have a lot of these other ways to kind of
figure out who's who. And the result is is it

(24:51):
splits the vote for the opponent and helps Kennedy win.
But beyond that, Kennedy and private is doing things that
people are unaware of. Yes he's thinned, yes he's sickly,
but the courage that it takes for him to mount
a campaign to get out of bed every morning at
this point in his life is extraordinary. It's absolutely extraordinary.

(25:14):
And this guy needs drugs to live. He's not an
attic he needs drugs just to get out of bed.
He's taking showers for five times a day and scalding
hot water because he needs to relieve the pressure on
his back. He's passing out a campaign events. He's speaking
way too fast for the audience he's doing. You know,
he's shy. He's introverted in that sense. He'd rather read

(25:36):
a book, as he once said, as opposed to going
up there and shaking hands with the steel workers and
the other factory workers in the district. But he doesn't.
He does it because in the end, it's about winning.
And the Kennedy family says, you know, we don't want
any losers around here. That's what Joe's instilled in the children.
And even Joe is taken aback by the son that

(25:58):
he always considered aloof and detached, the mysterious. Even he's
taken aback by saying, at one point during an afternoon
handshaking event, I didn't think he had it in him.
I never knew he could do this. And most of
the public, the vast majority of them, never knew just

(26:19):
what it took for him to get out of bed.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
He couldn't tie his own shoes. Most of the time.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
If we take that for granted, we bend over to
retire shoes, we get up, we go over. He can't
do that, Okay, he needs help getting his suit jacket on,
getting dressed. He's wearing braces.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
He has these.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Braces in these weird configurations that he's wrapping around is
growing into his back just so he can stand upright.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
On an odd level.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
That helps in the sensitive gives him that kind of
a walk of an older man, you know, and who
doesn't have a bad back at the age of sixty
in Boston after they've been working in the factories, and
he really appeals to them. Now, the other part of
that is he brings in the entire Kennedy family and
he runs outside of the Democratic Party. He could he
might as well put Kate next to his name instead

(27:08):
of d. I mean, the Kennedy family comes in, and
especially the women. Rose Kennedy and his four sisters are
there to campaign for him in a way that most
people had not seen at that particular time. So you
have a Rose Kennedy in a very nice dress, designer
dress from Paris, sending letters out to residents of the

(27:33):
congressional district inviting them to tease to meet the candidate.
And so here's this handsome, although very gone, very sickly
looking young man who's handsome to young women. The young
women there are all thinking they're not going to be
the next Missus Kennedy, and the older women all they
want to do is mother them and baby them and
feed them and you know, get him some soup and
you know, put them in the bed and took him

(27:55):
in and all this other stuff. So it really does
a wonder for the camp to have the family there
that way, and this first official campaign for this Kennedy
family becomes not only a family affair, but a permanent
affair and future campaigns, most famously, not only nineteen sixty

(28:15):
but when they finally beat the Lodges in nineteen fifty two.
When he enters Congress in nineteen forty seven, he is sick.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
He's tired of campaign.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
Has really wore him down, and he finds himself bored,
absolutely bored by Congress. Now, I know what you're thinking.
Congress bores a lot of us, except for me, who's.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
A political historian.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
But he realizes, at the age of twenty nine, you know,
this is not where the action is, and he wants
to be where the action is. And the only place
that a politician could be where the action is is
president of the United States. So he spends most of
his time in Congress chasing girls and what I call

(29:03):
constituent services, going to movies, driving his carway too fast, okay,
things of that nature. He's not a very good congressman.
He doesn't pay attention. It's just not his thing, okay.
But he's been biding his time, so he wins re
election easily in nineteen forty eight again in nineteen fifty.

(29:27):
By fifty one, Kennedy is trying to decide what am
I going to do?

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Now?

Speaker 1 (29:30):
I've been in the house long enough. Where's the next
place I can go? And the Kennedy family is thinking
about two things. One the United States Senate and two
the governorship of Massachusetts. Kennedy decides even though his friends
and colleagues in Congress, people like George Smathers Florida, are

(29:51):
telling them, Jack, you can't win.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
You know, you just can't.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
You can't win in a siting. You just go ahead
and run for governor. He says, no, I'm going to
run for Senate and I'm going to beat Lodge. Okay,
now I want to give you just a brief idea
of who Henner Cabot Lodge was. Henry Cabot Lodge is
not only a United States Senator, but he's wealthy as
a as wealthy as the Kennedy's. He is a war

(30:16):
hero and relinquishing his seat at one point to serve
in World War Two. His grandfather is a legendary Senator
Lodge who helped us scuttle the ratification of the League
of Nations. Okay, he is somebody who is a beloved
figure not only in Boston but in most Massachusetts. But

(30:38):
Kennedy wants to take him on anyways. Okay, and this
is part of you know, I've got to get in
the fight. And this is where the fight is at
right now. What they did in nineteen forty six, they
double in nineteen fifty two. This is going to be
a Republican year. Remember Eisenhower's running for president. People are

(30:59):
mad at Truman. Korea has gone down to a stalemate.
There are a few Democratic victories that year. But here's
this young Kennedy who is appealing to not only Massachusetts
voters but others that are watching the race.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Closely.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
And those Kennedy t's that were done in Boston in
forty six are now going to be done all across
the state, all across the commonwealth. Beyond that, these huge
crowds begin to show up at these Kennedy events, and
Joe Kennedy's working behind the scenes. He's paying off party bosses,
he's buying influence, he's working the media that he's had

(31:40):
lifelong connections to. He is going out, for example, and
he pays off of Boston publisher five hundred grand and
helps him save his paper, a Republican paper, by the way,
if he would endorse Jack. And at the same time
that this has happened, and Joseph McCarthy, the Senator from Wisconsin,
is on his witch hunt looking for communists everywhere. You know,

(32:02):
he would come to John said if he thought he
could get a television camera to film him.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
But Joseph, excuse me.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Joseph McCarthy is a personal friend of Joe Kennedy. Joe
Kennedy is given thousands of dollars to his campaign. He's Italian,
He's got excuse me, Irish and he goes and he
knows that if he goes, for example, to Boston and
campaigns for Lodge. It'll offend the old man and he
can't just bear that, so he stays out of the race.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Okay, all of this leads.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
To Jack Kennedy winning by seventy thousand votes in a
very narrow election. He beats the Lodges and it's a
Kennedy family victory, and by January when he takes a
seat in office, not only is he a United States Senator,
not only is he a political up and comer because
of his defeat of a Lodge, but he's also a

(32:59):
man who's operating really on borrow time. He has something
called Addison's disease. Addison's is almost HIV like in the
sense of that attacks the immune system. Okay, so something
like getting colds is dangerous, getting having surgery is dangerous
those types of things. So what Kennedy is also dealing
with is a back issue at the same time he's

(33:20):
dealing with Addison's, and he decides by nineteen fifty four
he's going to have to have some surgery. He just
can't live like this. Joe Kennedy is scared to death.
He says, no, Jack, don't do it, Please, don't do it.
He says, Dad, I'd rather be in a wheelchair. Excuse me,
be dead to be in a wheelchair, okay. And Dad said, well, no,
FDR is a wheelchair. You could he still was president,

(33:42):
you could be too. And he said, no, I can't
live this way. I don't care what the risk are.
I'm going to do it.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
And he does it.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
And what happens in the process is that he does
get an infection, okay, a bad infection. Not only does
he get the infection, but the wound itself in his
back does not close. Imagine this Jackie, who's just married
him a few months before, is taken care of him
down in Palm Beach, and when she flips him over

(34:11):
in the nursery that Joe Kennedy had created for him,
she looks down at his back and it's open. Now,
how many of you would like to look into your
loved one's body after surgery. It's not a pretty sight.
The darn thing wouldn't close. And as a part of that,
he keeps getting worse and worse until they finally have

(34:32):
to do another surgery and remove that and do some
other things to stabilize his back.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
He comes back weak, but renewed.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
He spends the time writing a book called Profiles and Courage,
which most people have heard of, talking about legendary senators
who had done politically unpopular things that they thought were
in the best interests of the country. He refuses also
at the same time to vote for centure against Joseph Karthy,
because after all, McCarthy's a friend. So the people and

(35:04):
within the Democratic Party who see him as suspect now
have even more reason to look at John Kennedy and
is something of a carbon copy of his dad. He
won't go after McCarthy. Maybe he's suspect on Jews too.
We don't know, maybe we can't trust him. In nineteen

(35:27):
fifty six, he makes the decision that's quite normal for politicians.
He goes to the Democratic convention in Chicago and Adlie Stevenson,
who had been the candidate in nineteen fifty two, has
secured a nomination once again, and he throws it open
to the convention of who's going to be the vice

(35:49):
presidential candidate, and Kennedy immediately jumps in. Now he's on
the phone with Bobby. Bobby's always there from forty six
onward as the campaign manager.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
The go to guy, even though.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
They're not close personally, and they get on the phone
with old Joe who's vacationing in the south of France,
and they tell them what they're going to do, and
they're you know, Bobby and Jack are on the phone,
put the phone over here, while Joe Kennedy is yelling
saying don't do it. And the call, of course a
whole lot of explosives. You know, Adlie Stevenson is a loser.

(36:22):
You'll be tard as a loser. The Eisenhower is gonna
win in a walk. Don't do this, and he says,
you know, I'm gonna do it. And it's not the
first time he takes on his father, but it's a
noteworthy time, and it's an important time because when he
does lose the vice presidential domination to the Tennessee Senator
ses Key Folder who had made his name chasing organized

(36:45):
crime and beating Boss Crump of Memphis, he becomes a
national figure when he gives his concession speech and he says,
you know, I hope this convention will make Adlie Stevenson's
nomination unanim us, you know, and he's there in defeat.
It's the first time he's really suffered political defeat, and
Kennedy is is almost beside himself there. But the grace

(37:09):
with which he conceded the race, the fact that he
and Bobby had gone out there on the campaign trail
afterwards and to try to help ad Lie, had only
endeared himself to the American public, not just Democrats, but
the American public. Here's a young man who's on his
way up. We're going to keep an eye on him.
At the same time that Kennedy is dealing with the

(37:30):
issue of, you know, plotting the course forward, he becomes
a very serious student of Congress. Not a good great legislature,
but a student of Congress. And there's the difference there.
He understands for the first time, he takes the interest
in understanding what is happening in the House of Representatives,
what is happening in the United States Senate. And as

(37:51):
a result of that, in part because of that, Kennedy
goes all across the country giving speeches, rubber chicken dinners,
meeting party bosses, meeting others, trying to make connections. Because
now it's about nineteen sixty and this is only nineteen
fifty six, he's arguably the first candidate who is planning

(38:17):
a race four years in advance. Today it's common, there's
some dope in the United States Senate planning is raised
for twenty twenty. All right, But he's new to he's
doing this in a new way, and he's selling himself
in a way that politicians traditionally at that time did
not do. Because the Kennedys and Jack and Joe Senior
in particular, they see politics as anything of business. That

(38:40):
means you have to market your product. As Joe Kennedy said,
it's not what you are that matters.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
It's what people think you are that matters.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Okay, And people see this youthful, vigorous, handsome young man
who wins reelection in nineteen fifty eight in a wall,
who enters nineteen fifty nine as an undeclared candidate for
the presidency, and old Joe is going around the country

(39:10):
talking to various people, and he's buying influence, and he's
buying delegates, and he's getting the big city bosses and
whispering in their ear, you know, boy, I could do
something for you. He's going to Massachusetts and telling David Lawrence, Hey,
you need to get behind Jack. If you don't get
behind Jack, you know, I once closed down his bank
by just pulling out my money, you know. I mean
he's threatening people, you know, and working all the while

(39:31):
behind the scenes to do it. So when Jack Kennedy
announces in January of nineteen sixty that he is a
candidate for the presidency, well it's a foregone conclusion. According
to most political observers. The issue quickly becomes is he
too young, too inexperience, too irish to win the presidency? Remember,

(39:55):
there are other candidates out there who have a lot
more experience, a lot more success in Congress and elected
office than he does. Centate majority leader Linda Johnson of
Texas is the most powerful majority leader in history who
certainly wants the presidency. Stu Simonton, the senator from Missouri,
wants in, and a number of other candidates want into

(40:16):
the race. So Kennedy makes a decision, Hey, I've got
to get into the primaries now. Today, it's not a
big issue too much, bless you, because all states virtually
have a primary or caucus one of the two, and
in nineteen sixty, however, only you know a dozen or
so states really have a caucus in West Virginia and

(40:38):
Wisconsin are two of them, and Kennedy makes decision.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
He has to run.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
He has to run in part to show that he
has political viability. He has to run to show that
he has the ability to attract not just Catholic voters
but Protestant voters. He has to run in order to
accumulate delegates to go to the convention in Los Angeles
in the summer of nineteen sixty, critically important for him. Remember,

(41:01):
most politicians running for the presidency up till nineteen sixty
then actively campaign. This is where that smoke field back
room comes from, where the polarty bosses at the conventions
make the decision about who's going to be president. Okay,
so Kennedy again is replicating what he did in Massachusetts

(41:24):
by running outside the party framework. And what he does
in the process is he begins to attrack young voters,
even kids who can't even vote, to which he made
a very derogatory remark about one time said, after damn
kroud can vote, why am I here?

Speaker 2 (41:42):
You know?

Speaker 1 (41:44):
And he also understands that things are changing, people don't
like the party bosses that he has to appeal to
the younger generation that the way campaigns are run are
going to be different from now on. It's a really
extraordinary thing. He's really ahead of his time in certain
ways in terms of campaign and Lynn Johnson waits to
the very last moment, in fact, chastising Kennedy and others

(42:07):
for leaving Washington to go to go campaign. He's saying,
I'm here legislating, I'm here doing work.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Where are they?

Speaker 1 (42:17):
The Catholic issue becomes a real threat to his candidacy.
So in nineteen excuse me, in nineteen sixty when he
runs Wisconsin and he wins, but he doesn't win by enough.
He's forced to go on to other primaries, especially in
West Virginia. That was Virginia's ninety eight ninety nine percent

(42:37):
Protestant in nineteen sixty. And it's a poor state, it's
a coal miner state. It's a democratic state, yes, but
not that kind of democratic. So Kennedy has his work
cut out for him, and he goes down there and
he campaigns throughout the state, and the Kennedy family comes again,
except now they're bearing suitcases of cash. West Virginia like Memphis,

(43:00):
like Nashville, like many cities and states across the nation.
It's corrupt politically, and all you needed to do is
give people quote unquote walking around money. And that means
you go to find the sheriff, you go find a
ward boss, you go find the other people within the
particular area that you're campaigning. You say, hey, here's a suitcase.

(43:22):
There's ten thousand dollars in it. There will be a
little bit more on our way back through if you
can carry your town for us. So he basically binds
his way through Wisconsin and in the Wisconsin and West Virginia,
and in the process he helps to force Hubert Humphrey,
to liberal senator from Minnesota, out of the race. So

(43:43):
when he rolls in to cut that person or that,
when he rolls into the Los Angeles, the Kennedys have
left nothing, the chance. They've loved nothing, the chance. LBJ
is still running around talking about he's going to be
the nomination.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
LBJ is, you know.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
Trying to pick off members of the Massachusetts delegation. Tip
O'Neill being one of them, who's now congressman who replaced
Jack Kennedy in the House when he was elected to
the Senate, and then old Tips telling him Hey, mister leader,
there's not gonna be a second ballot. I can't vote
for you. I got to stick with Jack. And he says, oh,
come on, you're smarter now, you know that. He says,

(44:21):
I don't think you understand the long arm of the
Kennedy family and Bobby, whose campaign manager left nothing the chance.
They even put Old Teddy, Young Teddy at this time,
excuse me out there to work the convention delegates and
go out there and talk to Wisconsin. Excuse me, Wyoming
to make sure that they're staying in line, because Robert

(44:42):
Kennedy has figured up every last vote and knows exactly
what Kennedy's going to need to get over the top
on the first ballot. So there goes Teddy and he's
talking to the party chairman. He says, you know, will
you give us these votes, these last votes. You know
we're gonna need those extra votes. And he says, well,
you've got this, and you know Johnson's got that. Are

(45:02):
you telling us is really in that few votes there?

Speaker 2 (45:06):
And he says yes. And he says, well, if it.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
Comes down to it, I'll take him away from Lenda
Johnson and give him right to Jack Kennedy. He says,
you've got it, And sure enough it comes to that point,
and Jack Kennedy gets the nomination on the first baller.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
When he starts the.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
Campaign for the presidency in the general election, now it's
going to become quite nasty because he's one win away,
and the Kennedy's are smelling the blood. And they're facing
a person who is arguably one of the best politicians
and interesting figures of the twentieth century, but a very
flawed man. And Richard Nixon tricky Dick, and Dick has

(45:40):
been vice president for eight years. Even Ike doesn't like
him that much. When a reporter asks Ike, you know,
can you tell something important that he did? Can you
tell something he did, something he contributed to on foreign politics, whatever,

(46:00):
he says, well, if you give me a week, I'll
think of something. Okay, So you know, and he's facing
a candidate who doesn't look good on TV. He's facing
a candidate who is unattractive in comparison to himself, okay.
And the irony of all this is Jack Kennedy and
Dick Nixon are friends, close friends. They went into Congress

(46:23):
the same year nineteen forty six. They had served on
various committees together. Hell Old Joe donated thousands of thousands
of dollars Nixon's campaign through Jack because, as Jack said,
I don't think Congress, I don't think Congress's loss in
Hollywood's game will be a big deal talking about them
defeating Hell and Hagen Douglas in nineteen fifty in the

(46:46):
California Senate race, a Democratic candidate of his own party.
So I do once you guys understand that, now Nixon's
going to face the full brun of the Kennedy family
and Jack Kennedy in particular, who's not going to men's words.
He's not going to play nice because, after all, this
is about winning. And you see this in that first debate,

(47:06):
that first debate that becomes legendary of presidential debates. And
Kennedy's there, he's been in the California's son. He's looking good,
he's ten, he's relaxed, he's shaved, he's taken a nap.
He took a nap that afternoon, so he's feeling good.
There's Nixon. Who oh, by the way, Jack Kenny has
makeup on.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Now.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
I know some of you guys want to say makeup,
but you need makeup on TV, okay, and Nixon doesn't
want to put any on, and then when he does
put some on, it's this cheap drug store kind. Then
he slaps on his face and there's Nixon with five
o'clock shadow, with those beady eyes perspiring, looking nervous, and

(47:50):
there's Kennedy there, legs crossed, looking very comfortable. And Kennedy
had literally turned up some of the heat in the
room too, knowing that it would make Nixon uncomfortable. So
people that watched that debate said that Kennedy had won.
The people who listened on the radio said that Nixon
had won. The truth of the matter is is that

(48:12):
is a little both, yes, But it was also an
issue of the fact that the race remained razor thin. Okay,
it was that tight. It was that close. So when
it gets to November and Kennedy is, you know, going
to High Ends finally after going to Boston then giving
his last campaign speech, and he's voting and he goes

(48:33):
home to watch the results, they really don't know where
it's gonna go.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
And what it.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
Boils down to by two three o'clock in the morning
is the closest race in generations. Okay, they don't know
who's gonna win. Jack Candy goes to bed.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
At four a m. Not knowing who won.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
So, you know, despite all the money, all the advantages,
it boils down to the Kennedy family through Joe and
Lyndon Johnson buying votes in Cook County, Illinois, which is Chicago,
and buying votes down in Texas to make sure that
those two states fall into Democratic column. And in the end,
Kennedy wins just barely nine percent, forty nine point seven

(49:18):
to forty nine point five to five percent. It was
an extraordinarily close race, and Kennedy's taken aback by this.
You know, how could this happen? I saw all those
adoring crowns of Manhattan and then Los Angeles. I had
Frank Sinatra campaigning for me with his songs. You know,
I'm I'm definitely cut it and Dick next, And how
did this happen? And he realizes that this causes a

(49:40):
serious political problem because it does not give him a mandate.
There's no mandate. Okay, he doesn't even get the majority.
He gets plurality. Okay, so he enters the White House
with this really as Ted Sorenson, as close aid, said
this heady feeling. You know, you beat the competition. You're

(50:01):
the president of the United States. Nobody can touch you.
And as Ted Sorenson also said, that's a very dangerous
feeling to have. So when Kennedy goes to Washington in
January nineteen sixty one, Kennedy is feeling quite good about
things in the sense of least the campaign's over. At
least I'm president. I could be in the Senate right now.

(50:22):
But he's exhausted physically. He's taking cortizona, steroid injections, etc.
To keep him healthy. That's only working partly things of
that nature, and those first one hundred days or so,
give or take, are going okay. He's getting his feet
under me. He's still pretty new. But then something happens

(50:43):
to him that changes his entire presidency. And that's called
the Bay of Pigs. Some of you may remember, some
of you may not, but the Bay of Pigs was
a landing of Cuban exiles in Cuba at the Bay
of Pigs and a really kooky attempt by the sea
to send exiles in thinking that well, once they land

(51:04):
on the beach, is there the people in Havana and elsewhere,
they'll rise up against Castro. Kennedy never asked a question,
what's going to happen when these fourteen hundred or so
Cuban exiles find out that there's twenty five thousand soldiers
with the Castro army? And what happens is it's a
really bad situation. Deteriorate quickly, more than a hundred to kill.

(51:28):
Others are in prison, and some are tortured. And Kennedy
refuses to go along with if you will the military
plans to invade Cuba. He says, I'm not going to
war over this. He said, I'm not going to provide
air cover because the whole point of it was supposed
to be it was a Cuban exile thing, not an
American thing. In the end, he finds out as he said,

(51:51):
you know, I was stupid. You know I was stupid,
and he resolves himself right then and there. I will
never trust the military again. I will not trust the CIA.
I will not trust the so called experts who led
me into this disaster and try to manipulate me into invading.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Go ahead again. Under Nixon Aisenhower.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
The planning did, yes, absolutely, the planning and the training
of those exiles did absolutely. Kennedy gave it the green
light though in April, to go forward despite his own
better judgment and in quite frankly, he didn't ask the
right questions and they did. The record shows that they
tried to manipulate him into dupraw into going into all

(52:34):
out war because they're hystericalval Castro and Kennedy shares the
hysterical feeling to it, but not to the same extent.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
Go ahead and everything that operated is.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
CIA had said that they would not please military air.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
DDE no, but he They had also asked him to
provide air cover if it became necessary, and when it
became necessary, he refused. Yeah. So he comes out of
this really disheartened. I mean he's crying in private. Jackie's
never seen him like this before. But he makes several decisions.
One Alan Doles of the CIA has to go. Can't

(53:14):
do it immediately, but within months he.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Will be gone.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
The joint chiefs of staff, they are going to have
to be dealt with as well, including bringing in some
of his own people like Maxwell Taylor, who will become
chief of staff within a short period of time of
the joint chiefs. He also resolves to make Bobby, who
had made attorney general his chief aid, his chief aid.
And this is important because Bobby is going to go

(53:40):
from attorney General at the Justice Department to the all
around political and policy man for the president, almost as
an assistant president. When nothing's done without Bobby knowing about,
nothing's done without his okay. And the professional relationship between
the two men is so close that they can finish
each other sentences. Sometimes they can communicate without even speaking.

(54:05):
That's how close the relationship becomes. On the other hand,
Jack Kennedy never invites him up to the residence for dinner.
That's not Bobby's place, and Bobby's course upset about that.
Ethel his wife is upset about that. But it's really
an interesting relationship that develops there. But Bobby becomes even
more dedicated and devoted to his brother's cause.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
Excuse me.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Beyond that, Kennedy continues to double down on what is
his chief political policy global concern, which is the Cold
War in the Soviet Union. He sees foreign affairs as
more important in the sense that it can kill you.
He sees domestic politics is important to a point, but

(54:51):
not something you necessarily want to deal with, you know,
not when you've got foreign affairs out here. This is
not going to kill you. This will His focus is
on the Cold War and what to do in Berlin.
Berlin is an important topic here. Vietnam is increasingly an
important topic. Of course, Cuba is now right on the
front burner. So Kennedy goes to Vienna in the summer

(55:14):
sixty one to meet.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Krish Cheff and Kris.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
Jeff as you know, difficult, bombastic, arrogant, much older than Kennedy's. Hell,
he's got a son Kennedy's age, so he doesn't have
a whole lot of respect for him, and he just
gets tore up by the Chris Chef at the meetings.

(55:40):
He comes out of one of them looking absolutely dazed.
As one reporter said at the time, Kennedy just he
didn't realize the toughness of Khrushcheff in the sense that yes,
he's crazy, but only to a point. He's highly intelligent,
and he knows how to bully people, and you can't
charm him, and in some ways that in nineteen sixty
one can't have intelligent, dispassionate conversations with him, and he's

(56:04):
basically telling them there will be a war over Berlin, Okay,
And that's the concern because Berlin is the hotspot, Okay,
because Berlin has been divided body Allies since the end
of World War Two. It's a critical spot in the
Cold War. So Kennedy comes back to America talking about,
how do I know reassert myself, how do I make

(56:25):
myself more my intentions more clearer to the cruise chef
that we're going to have resolved, that we're going to
be tough. And he says we're gonna have to do
this in Vietnam, and Kennedy begins what is an incredible
build up of quote unquote military advisors in Southeast Asia.
Now he's not happy about it. Going all the way

(56:46):
back to the Senate years, he had talked about the
folly of going into Southeast Asia, specifically with the French.
But now he's thinking about in regard to the Americans.
But he can't appear to be weak. He didn't win
election by that much. He just has suffered a horrible
defeat at the Bay of Pigs. Kruse Cheff has just
bullied him, and everybody in the country knows it.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
So he's dealing with these types of issues, and at
the same time he's dealing with these foreign policy issues,
he's dealing with the mestic issues that are quite important,
most particular, most importantly the civil rights movement and May
sixty one, the freedom right start.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
Okay in the South, at one point.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
In Aniston having bombs bust excuse me, buses bombed by
white rioters okay, disgusting Kennedy and raging many people across
the nation, to the point where he tells Bobby to
get a hold of somebody and says, well, you know,
you got to get your GD friends off those buses.

(57:46):
You know, Jackie's upset about what she's seen. She doesn't
like it anymore than he does. So he's dealing with that,
and he keeps pushing them off, pushing them off, because
the two things that he comes into the presidency with
is one that keeps civil rights on the back burner
because he sees it as a threat to his presidency,
and to keep the Cold War from boiling over. That's
his two main objectives there. Fast forwarding here just a

(58:10):
little bit to nineteen sixty two, Kennedy finds himself on
sixteen October being notified that there are offensive nuclear weapons
in Cuba. He had promised earlier to keep a close
eye on to build the Soviet build up on that island,

(58:36):
and now there was irrefruit feedable evidence that yes, in fact,
there were troops there, there were weapons there, conventional and nuclear, etc.
And it triggers what is known today as the Cuban
missile crisis. And all that anti communist rhetoric to Kennedy used,
all that missile gap rhetoric he used during the campaign,
now it's coming to a head. This is arguably the

(58:56):
closest time comes to what an amount to a nuclear holocaust.
And he creates what it's called the ex commert Executive
Committee of the National Security Council, where he's going to
be a member. Bobby's going to be there, several aids
are going to be there, the Secretary of State, Secretary
of Defense, Secretary treasurer, and others are going to be
a part of this committee. And we got to figure
out what to do it. Almost every single one of

(59:17):
them want to bomb, bomb bomb. We got to take
this out. We got to do it. Now, Even Bobby
Kennedy is on that side. But after more and more discussion,
and remember this is hidden from the American public that
this is taking place for several days, Kennedy starts reconsidering,
wait a second here, we can't pull this back. We

(59:39):
can't do this. Bobby very openly in the meeting, says,
I don't want my brother to be the Tojo of
American history by attacking a country, a sovereign country, without warning.
We've got to find another way. Eventually, what they come
to is the idea of a blockade or quarantine of Cuba,
putting the US Navy down there in the Caribbean to

(01:00:00):
basically prevent Soviet ships from coming in without being inspected.
And Kennedy goes on television he tells the American public
for the first time, can you imagine a national security
issue like this waiting several days before the American people
know it?

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Today?

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
We know every time George W. Bush or Barack Obama
goes to the bathroom, somebody tweets it. Not in nineteen
sixty two, Kennedy is able to resolve this by the
twenty eighth of October by coming to a deal with
kirsh Chieff. He says, one privately, yes, we will get

(01:00:36):
rid of the weapons in Turkey, which was offensive to them. Two,
we will promise not to aid and or aid anybody
or go into Cuba. Three you have to pull these
weapons out, and you have to pull them out now.
You got to get them out of there, and you've
got to get some of these troops out there as well. Privately,
he begins to think, wait a second, it's not what

(01:00:59):
the media says in terms of that blend of toughness
and diplomatic skill, that ononness. It was luck and God
that won it. We're going to have to draw back here.
How many weapons do we really need? And it begins
the process of an early call for Dayton, you know,
and he starts talking about test ban treaty and Chris

(01:01:20):
Chef is badly damaged politically he as well as talking
about peace. And they're talking about this despite the fact
there are hardline elements in both governments. They're saying no, no, no, no, no, right,
we can't do this. I mean, some of the most
famous people in America are saying this is a national
security disaster to pass or to ratify a nuclear test

(01:01:42):
ban treaty, even if it's limited in scope. But the
American public responds quite well to not only his leadership
but the end result there. The American public also feels M.
Kennedy is putting the country on the right course, even
though he is still conscious reversal in some respects, even
though there's some people that still would like him to

(01:02:03):
take different positions. So in nineteen sixty three he really
comes into his own as president. He pursues the test
Ban Treaty to successful completion. In October, he gets it.
He goes over to Senate to get it passed. Number two,
he declares civil rights a moral issue for the first
time in a landmark address. He begins to give hope

(01:02:28):
to the civil rights protesters who are so badly struggling
in the South and in other areas. He presides successfully
over to march on Washington, which did not have any
violence in late August of nineteen sixty three. The one
drawback that he does have is that he has a
crushing personal defeat, and that is the death of his

(01:02:50):
son Patrick in August. The little boy was born with
a disease, had some problems with the membranes of his lungs.
I understand from medical doctors today it had been fixed today,
it couldn't be at that time. He's put in a
hyperbolic chamber. He lasted about two days.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
This is a man who's quite stoic. He's not prone
to emotionalism. But he tells Jackie about it because she's
still recovering. She wasn't able to be there to the
actual death. He's crying. He's crying for days. The Secret
Service has to remove him in Boston from the casket
because he won't let it go okay, and it draws
the two of them closer. Going into those last three

(01:03:28):
months of his life, they become incredibly close. The exercise
routine he had been engaged in had helped him feel better.
He'd started spending more time with the family, with the children,
enjoying life a little bit, still concerned, still working hard,
but he's dealing with these other issues in it. He's
really coming into the presidency. Where to Kennedy do we
kind of think of today? That Kennedy in the fall

(01:03:50):
sixty three, beyond the family relations there didn't see itself
had been unnerving to be this Irish Catholic president did
not sit well with some people. Bobby Kennedy had antagonized
a great many by going after the the mafia. People

(01:04:14):
were upset still over debate of pigs in certain circles
in this country. Others were greatly annoyed at what they
considered style over substance. With the Kennedy presidency, Kennedy had
gone after the steel bosses when they tried to raise
the prices of steel, and even using the federal government

(01:04:34):
in ways there were maybe or maybe not so legal,
such as auditing executives. Kennedy himself had made enemies within
the military establishment, most notably Curtis LeMay, the Air Force head. Okay,
so when he gets in the September and October of

(01:04:55):
sixty three and he's starting to think about the campaign
of sixty four, one of the first places he thinks
about is Texas got to win Texas. Texas is going
to be important, but Texas is also a dangerous place.
People like to think. And I joke with my students,
you know that Ted Cruz isn't you know something new
to Texans.

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
He's not.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
Ted Cruise is in a long line of very conservative
Texas politicians. And in nineteen sixty three, in places like Dallas,
you have people like John Birch Society, klu klux Klan,
White Citizens' Councils, other types of ultra right wing, right
wing groups, including General Edwin Walker that had to be
relieved okay, of his command and forced into retirement because

(01:05:41):
of what he was doing in the military. In the
Army beyond now Allie Stevenson had been attacked spit on
hit in doubts weeks before Oswald. Nobody knows it yet,
they will as soon as the death happens. Oswald has
tried to assassinate General Walker in April that year, Okay,

(01:06:04):
trying to he miss He thought he got him, but
he had passed by him in his house and hit
a wall. So it's a dangerous place. He doesn't necessarily
want to go there, but he knows he has to.
There's a devastating political fight going on between Lyndon Johnson,
who's vice president but has no power in John Connolly,

(01:06:26):
his protege, who's governor and does have power, and Liberal
Senator Ralph Yarborough, who's mad at both of them. So
Kennedy has to repair some of the damage within the party.
So he makes a decision, Yes, we're going to go
to Texas. But people had warned him, including Johnson, including others, Hey,
there could be some problems here. This could be nasty
in Texas. But he decides to go ahead anyways. And

(01:06:49):
that's part of that fearless, devil, make care attitude that
he exhibits. And he asked Jackie to come with him.
He says, you know, I like you to come to Dallas.
She usually doesn't campaign with him. She doesn't like politicians,
she doesn't like politics, she likes the arts in high entertainment,
high brow culture. But she agrees to in part because
of the closeness that they had developed over the period

(01:07:10):
of the previous couple months. So on November twenty first,
they leave for Texas on a trip that's going to
take them to Dallas, Fort Word, to San Antonio, Houston, Austin,
the LBJ Ranch, and Johnson City. The crowds are large
in Houston and in San Antonio. The welcome is quite

(01:07:33):
surprising to him. When he gets to Fort Worth on
the night of the twenty first, late in the evening,
it's running around midnight, hither he's dog tired or people
standing out there in the rain waiting to see him.
The Fort Worth business community had put together one of
the finest collections of art in the state and in

(01:07:54):
the southwestern United States in his hotel room. He doesn't
even notice it until the next morning. They're so tired.
The next morning he wakes up, he gives a speech
outside to onlookers and others, very brief speech, shakes a
bunch of hands, and then he goes inside to speak
to the chamber breakfast and others. After he leaves and

(01:08:17):
makes his way to the airport, Kennedy is caught on
camera holding Jackie's hand. This rarely happened.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
He didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:08:27):
Neither one of them was big on public displays of affection.
But there's a you know, there's that big, meaty hand
of his grabbing her little hand as they're walking up
to the plane. Kind of noteworthy there. And they fly
to Dallas from Fort Worth. Now an interview familiar with texts,
You know that Fort Worth is right there next to Dallas.
You could really just drive it and maybe quicker, but

(01:08:49):
there's nothing like Air Force one landing at your airport.
And this is also a campaign trip. Don't forget Okay.
Several years ago, George W. Bush came here and a
lot of people went out to the airport to see
Air Force one, you know, and the whatnot, and people
do the same thing at love Field in Dallas, and
Dallas is really the city that really kind of concerns

(01:09:11):
them more than any other because of the climate of Dallas.
It's a very Hatefield town at this time in certain circles,
disproportionately so in comparison to other areas of Texas. He
begins to motorcate around eleven point forty am Central Standard
time in Dallas, making its way to the Trademark where

(01:09:32):
he's supposed to give a speech. A round twelve thirty,
he stops the shake hands with some nuns. He stops
to shake hands with some school children. He walks the
line at the airport, so he's behind as he's moving along.
As the crowds get into downtown Dallas, the crowns really
become huge, ten fifteen, eighteen feet deep, so much so
that the Secret Service has to move the car to

(01:09:55):
one side, getting Jackie closer to the crowd, but moving
the president and away from the crown for safety reasons.
Windows are open, people are, you know, hanging out of
them looking at him. It's a warm day. The rain
is stopped the bubbletop is not on there. Everybody can
see him in this open car as the car turns
for Maine on the Houston and then Houston on the Elm.

(01:10:17):
He's right there in Daily Plaza at the.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
Texas school Book Depository building.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
And when he passes that, a series of reports comes out,
a series of shots comes out. The President begins to slump.
I'm gonna show a video that here in just a
quick seconds, very short, and the president is basically neurologically.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
Dead at the last shot.

Speaker 1 (01:10:42):
It's an extraordinary excuse me video made by Dallas dressmaker
by the name of Abraham Suppruder. It's about a minute long.
I warn you it is graphic. Okay, but I think
that she'll least be able to get an idea here.

(01:11:03):
This is arguably the most famous home movie in history,
in world history now, nobody is seeing anything quite like this.
I'm hoping this will work here. Okay, I do that right,

(01:11:25):
because I'm not sure it's not moving. Will you work
on this for a second while I'm talking. Kennedy has
taken the Parklan Memorial Hospital, where the doctors work on
him forwards of half an hour until around one o'clock
but truly he's dead by about twelve forty two, twelve

(01:11:46):
forty three. They don't release it. They don't say he's
dead yet for several reasons. One, they need to get
a Catholic priest there to perform the last rites. Secondly,
they don't want anybody to say they couldn't have done
something more okay, uh So they fudge the numbers a
little bit. When Kennedy is pronounced that at one PM,

(01:12:09):
Johnson leaves and goes on back to Air Force one
UH at love Field, but he refuses to leave without Jackie.
Now Jackie's covered with brains, she's covered bone, she's covered blood,
she's she's not leaving the hospital without the body. And
the result of that is they basically steal the body
from Dallas, Texas. A lot at the Times said you

(01:12:32):
had to perform an autopsy. Kenny O'Donnell, his chief of staff,
basically says, no, we're not doing that. He's the president,
he's our man. He's leaving. The Secret Service take their
orders and guns are drawn. There's almost a fist. Five
people are shoving and cursing, and Jackie is standing right
there with her hand on the casket and you know,
they basically used their their force, their brute forced to

(01:12:55):
push the doctors and the policemen aside to get to
get out there. Now, some people say this is a conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
They stole the body.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
Well, if they stole the body, Jackie agreed with it.
Jackie wanted it that way. Uh to Kenny O'Donnell, Dave Powers,
his close political aids who were more friends than aids,
wanted it. It was not that type of situation there.
The body is returned to Dallas, excuse me, Washington around
six pm, a little after six after nightfall on the

(01:13:25):
night of the twenty second. It's it's rolling roll on. Hey,
it's not that okay, Uh, because that's pretty small. Okay, Damn,
I did it again.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
I'm so sorry about that. Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Here is Abraham's Prude's film. He see's already been hit there,
Connolly's been hit in front of him, and that's the
fatal headshot there.

Speaker 4 (01:13:58):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
If you want to google it at home, you can
see steals of it. Okay, now you're seeing this here tonight.
Most Americans did not see anything other than steels for
the years. It wasn't until Heraldo showed it on his
show Believe it or not, Heraldo in the mid nineteen seventies. Okay,
that Americans actually saw the suppruve of him because Time Life,

(01:14:22):
Abraham Supruder and others saw it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
This was way too graphic.

Speaker 1 (01:14:25):
To show to the American public, Okay, because if you
look at it closely, you can see brains falling out
of his head.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
That type of situation.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
Now, when the body gets back, it immediately goes to Bethesda. Now,
some conspiracy theorists say, aha, that's where the co conspirators
were to perform the ridiculously bad autopsy. Well, Jackie decided
where they were going to go, and now I did it.
You're going to have conspirators at Walter Reed and Bethesda

(01:14:55):
just waiting. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
On the other hand, when they do get there, the
autopsy is rushed. It begins around eight pm. The photos
that you see online of Kenny's eyes open and stuff,
that's right before the autopsy begins. I won't go into
the graphic nature what an autopsy really is, but many

(01:15:15):
of you know they finish up around midnight. But the
scene is utter chaos. You've got a secret Service agent
and collecting evidence, evidence, which, by the way, never really
pops up again. Nobody knows what the hell happened to
some of it. On the other hand, you have all
kinds of FBI officials, CIA officials, military officials in there.

(01:15:37):
None of them are medical professionals. You have people talking
about what's private and what's not, what should be private,
what's private for the Kennedy family, And some of that
is coming from Bobby Kennedy, who's there at the hospital
giving orders, saying, wait a second, well, we don't necessarily
want to cut too far into him because we'll see
how badly or how sick he really was.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
You have doctors who are not the best in terms
of combat injuries performing the autops so you have doctors
who are being intimidated by staff who was there watching
the autopsy, which leads into conspiracy theories. When it's finished,
the morticians come in from Washington from a Washington funeral home.
They make up the body as best they can it.

(01:16:25):
It's taken back into an ambulance with a new casket.
Back to the White House the line and repose in
the East room around four am. And this is the
first time Secret Service agents Jackie, Bobby and others have
had a chance to really sit, okay and kind of
contemplate what's happening there. Lee Harvey Oswald at this time

(01:16:46):
is sitting in the Dallas jail being interrogated, Okay, being interrogated.
He's arrogant, he's smug, he's enjoying the attention that he's receiving.
Originally charged with a d excuse me, a Dallas police
officer's murder, it's quickly determined that he's also at fall

(01:17:07):
for the president's murder. The weekend has spent in a
haze of twenty four hour news, something unheard of in
nineteen sixty three. Has the three big stations, ABC, CBS,
and the NBC are showing funeral coverage around the clock.
There's nothing else to watch, okay, nothing really else to watch.

(01:17:28):
Everybody's watching, everybody's talking about this. So it's the introduction
of what Ted Herner will bring at the beginning of
the eighties with CNN NonStop coverage of news, and it
has a powerful impact on people. Here's a man who's
dead at the age of forty six, who looks incredibly young,
who has a beautiful wife, who's thirty four with two

(01:17:49):
young kids. How can he be gone so soon? What
about all the promos, etc. Center. When he's laid the
rest on Monday, November twenty fifth, Lee Harvey Oswald's gone,
shot mysteriously by a man behind the name of Jack
Ruby and the Dallas Basement as he's getting ready to

(01:18:11):
be transferred to a county jail. This also leads into
conspiracy and secret service agents. Are you know, incredibly frustrated?
You know they're saying, Oh God, you know, we're not
gonna know what happened here? What you know, what is
this about, etc.

Speaker 2 (01:18:23):
Eac.

Speaker 1 (01:18:24):
So when he's laid to rest, Jackie is also put
in place not just the funeral, but an eternal flame
for him at Arlington National Cemetery, which for those of
you who haven't been, you should go. It's right across
the river from Washington, and his grave overlooks Washington d C.
It's almost in a line, if you will, with the
Lincoln Memorial, the in the Mall, in the in the

(01:18:45):
the Washington Monument. Within a year of the death, the
Warren Commission releases it to report saying Lee Harvey Oswald
killed him and killed him alone. But they're countless tapes
not as good as this one, but countless tapes and
eyewitness accounts to say, wait, of a second, I saw

(01:19:06):
something over there. You can see them on tape running
up the grassy, and all others don't believe what has happened.
They don't believe the Warren Commission report either, so much
so that but even before Jim Garrison and New Orleans
begins investigating in that famous move as it was put
in Hollywood in JFK by Oliver Stone, people are already

(01:19:29):
doubting the official results there of the investigation. The House
Select Committee on Assassinations investigates in the late nineteen seventies,
they find a high probability of a conspiracy in a
second gunman. And then you have Oliver Stone by nineteen
ninety one, with his movie, which went so far as
to force Congress to create the JFK Records Act and

(01:19:49):
create the Assassination Records Review Board try to declassify and
release as much information as possible. The result of this,
all this is that you have an administration that stopped
dead in its tracks to hope the promise that came
from Kennedy ends there on that street in Dallas the

(01:20:09):
conspiracy theories, some of which do have some grain assault
to them that there may be something there, have nonetheless
destroyed much of the political and social fabric of the nation.
It brought help to usher in not just Watergate and Vietnam,
but it helped to usher in hyper partisanship and political
dysfunction in the United States. We don't trust anything anymore, right,

(01:20:33):
I mean, my mama, mind tell me something, I still
have to go double check it, all right, That's not
the same situation in nineteen sixty three. So for an
entire generation of Americans is one of the worst moments
of their lives. For the succeeding generations, it's something that
has etched in their memory as historical memory. Not that

(01:20:56):
they experienced it, but they wanted to experience. This is
the infatuation with Bill Clinton, This is the infatuation with
Barack Obama, This is the infatuation with you know, do
good causes because you know, look that Jack Kendy created
the Peace Corps. Look how handsome he was, you know
all this kind of thing. So finally, I'd just like
to ramp up by saying that it's a terrible moment

(01:21:19):
for the family. But it's a terrible moment for the country.
And Kennedy had spoke publicly about the problems of conspiracy theorists.
He spoke publicly about the problems associated with, for example,
the growing distrust in American society, which preceded his death
as a real threat to American democracy. And now we

(01:21:40):
find ourselves in twenty thirteen with a country that is
so bitterly divided between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and Tea partiers,
Northerners and Southerners, Westerners and coastal people versus people in
the heartland, that we have boiled down to the point
now where nothing can get done. Tens of millions of

(01:22:04):
people have no healthcare, tens of millions of people can't
get adequate employment, tens of millions of people are ill,
are poorly educated, and we have a political system now
this is a large part of a result of what
happens here in Dallas.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
That is.

Speaker 1 (01:22:22):
Grind to a halt, that is not going It is
failing to the American public. So, whether you were alive
in nineteen sixty three and can remember this, whether you
were born in the last twenty years or twenty five years,
this event impacts you. It is the crime of the century,
regardless of who actually pulled the trigger, because what is
important here is that a real man is dead, and

(01:22:45):
a real man's policies, the real man's rhetorical gifts and symbolism.
This idea of renewing oneself and renewing giving to others,
that type of thing that epitomized the best part of
the Kennedys and the Kennedy administration is now obliterated.

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
It's gone, and.

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
In a way Americans are still trying to find that
candidate who can reinstill that. This is in part Reagan's
appeal when he's talking about, you know, the sunny days
are going to come back, you know, regardless of the politics.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:23:17):
I watched the thing that this morning of a congressman
from Texas, a tea party congressman almost crying talking about
getting the shake Jack Kennedy's hand on the morning under
November twenty second, and how much he meant to him.

Speaker 2 (01:23:32):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
So, I just want to wrap up there by saying
thank you for coming. I hope you enjoyed this presentation.
I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, and
I'm ready to go at any time.

Speaker 2 (01:23:49):
Not leave, but you know, yes.

Speaker 4 (01:23:59):
Yes, First, so what's the kind of your background on
how did you get involved in that topic.

Speaker 1 (01:24:05):
I got involved in this topic as a young man
in the early eighties when a Greade school teacher of
mine gave me a book report on John Kennedy and
I never heard of them, and so I'm starting to
read and I'm coming across stuff like assassination.

Speaker 2 (01:24:23):
Death.

Speaker 1 (01:24:23):
I had to look up assassination. I was so young,
I'm coming across you know, I'm a young boy. Remember
there's people like Marilyn Monroe, and there may have been
hanky hanky and what isn't that interesting? It went from
there to you know, reading everything I get my hands
on regarding this, and I know I didn't have enough

(01:24:45):
time to do it tonight, but being able to take
a look at that. I remember the twenty fifth anniversary,
in the thirtieth anniversary and all the events that came
with that, and you have to remember twenty twenty five
years ago, there was a lot more people alive that
were somehow hied to that, and they were given interviews
and speeches and things like that, and it just really,
you know, kind of inspired me to get involved in

(01:25:08):
professional history as a profession. My parents instilled that as
well and me. You know, I got to see President
Kennedy's grave in the eighties for the first time. I've
seen him many times since, but that was particularly noteworthy,
especially since Jackie was still alive, so it was just
him and the two kids buried there.

Speaker 2 (01:25:27):
Now she's buried there.

Speaker 1 (01:25:29):
So when I went to graduate school, I was fortunate
enough to go to graduate school and be able to
pursue something that was dear to me. It's the one
privilege I think, and part that academics have is that
we can study whatever we want to study as long
as we teach our classes and do our other jobs.

(01:25:50):
So that's how I got.

Speaker 2 (01:25:52):
Involved with it was as a young child.

Speaker 5 (01:25:57):
Yes, I remember from grad school and the saying that
this significant is a child who was a space program. Yes,
how just set song into the historical covernment.

Speaker 1 (01:26:11):
Well, it's it's certainly one of the more remarkable aspects
of his presidency. When he gives an address to Congress
in May of nineteen sixty one, he talks about the
space program. Remember we've had SPOTNEK four years before in
nineteen fifty seven, right, we you know, the Russians have
just put a man who's gone into orbit, okay, And

(01:26:34):
he sees this as very important in terms of national purpose.
This is something Kennedy's doing. That's why he's asking people
to help the country, and the space program is one
way in which to do that, to appeal to people's imaginations.
So historians look at look at it quite positively, with
the caveat of understanding that Kennedy also ignores sor it

(01:26:54):
for other things through a great deal of his presidency.
But it was still high up there in his own mine,
and of course lbj uh was particularly fond of it
because you know, well you saw you see where the
Johnson Space Center is located, and he was still partial
to Texas. So it's a big thing for historians. But

(01:27:15):
there are other things, such as foreign policy and civil
rights that are also kind of crowned out sometimes the
issue regarding uh the space program. But it's certainly important
to put the country on the path to July sixty
nine when uh they land on the moon.

Speaker 4 (01:27:31):
Yes, yeah, myself, I've got reinterested in all this recently
and have read a lot of the textam them.

Speaker 2 (01:27:41):
When he's from the War One Commission the House selection
may uh, so forth, I kind of assume you don't
think there.

Speaker 6 (01:27:50):
Was an inspiracy or this was a one man Do
you think it was a one man deal?

Speaker 1 (01:27:55):
I think, But I'm going to uh, I'm going to
say that as a historian, I'm going to stand by
the official report in the sense that I have no evidence,
which is what historians use to refute it. My grad
students do this. They're double checking their papers right now

(01:28:16):
as we speak. On the other hand, personally, I do
think there was a conspiracy. The personal part of me
thinks there was a conspiracy, but it's hard. I mean,
there's some evidence there. One of the things I point
out to people is that some of the things that
look like they're really weird and could be the farias

(01:28:36):
are really not. You know, for example, people hanging out
of the windows. Well, it's nineteen sixty three, people, it's
a warm day in down so they don't have central
air and heat. You know, of course they're going to
be hanging out of the windows. The Secret Service doesn't
have the same protocols as it does today. And as
Clinton Hill said, the man who was chasing the limousine

(01:28:57):
and crimes on top of it, and you have assassination
ends that quickly. There's little you can do no matter
how much firepower you may, you may have the go ahead.

Speaker 2 (01:29:07):
Yes, the protocols of the Sacred Service. I was a questioning.

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
You said that they didn't have the protocols to have
the windows closed, or the storm drains taped or the
or such as that.

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):
No, it's a very different secret service in nineteen sixty three.
Number One, it's badly undermanned in many rout ways. Number two,
it is badly overworked. Okay, this is a do you
realize that in nineteen sixty three you had Secret Service
agents who can qualify for welfare.

Speaker 2 (01:29:42):
This is not the.

Speaker 1 (01:29:42):
Elite secret service that you think of today. It's a
different world now, So the protocols are different. They're not
going to go in there. There's no Secret Service agent
and Daily Plasma. They're all on the cars. They're all
on the vehicles, they're in the motorcy So today that
number one, there would have been Secret Service agents and

(01:30:04):
others within Daily Plaza on the ground. You would have
felt their existence or presence there. Secondly, if this happened today,
the windows would have been closed regardless of the heat
or the conditions in the buildings. They would have been closed.
They would have closed storm drains, they would have closed
sewers and things like that that they didn't do then.
And remember, in nineteen sixty three, it's been sixty two

(01:30:27):
years since an American president has been assassinated. McKinley was
assassinating nineteen oh one. It's a different world. This is
the first time they've got a really big threat. They're tired.
They're young men, patriotic, young men, often first generation college graduates.
They're doing the best job that they can possibly do.
So it's not the same that you would have today.

Speaker 3 (01:30:48):
It's in the warrants message testimony that they were at
the cellar till four o'clock in the morning drinking.

Speaker 2 (01:30:54):
Yeah, the night before.

Speaker 1 (01:30:56):
Yes, yes, that's absolutely true. Unfortunately, that's something that you
would still see today if you listen to some reports
of secret services.

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):
Today. They were fired today, they over fired. In nineteen
sixty three, they weren't fired. No, no, they weren't fired.

Speaker 1 (01:31:13):
In fact, the director of Deceipt Service at the time
tried to.

Speaker 2 (01:31:16):
Defend his men by who soon retire.

Speaker 1 (01:31:20):
Yes, yes, well, heads are going to roll when the
present dies I mean, there's no doubt of Bauance, with
exception of Jagger Hoover, who can blackmail everybody in Washington.

Speaker 2 (01:31:31):
Yeah, it's not the same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:31:33):
They certainly were wrong and what they were doing the
night before. But I would be careful in the sense
of too harshly criticizing these these young men, and these
were young men in their late twenties, early thirties, and.

Speaker 3 (01:31:46):
With all due respect, this has been a great presentation.
I definitely do not want to steal thunder. But if
I were to show you a love Field video of
an agent responding to a superior orders to cease and assist.

Speaker 1 (01:31:58):
Yes, I don't know what you're talking about. What he's
referring to is a secret Service agent. As the car
pulls away, when Kennedy gets in the car and the
cars pulling away, Kenny's not care you know, He's getting
on with the thing. There's a Secret Service doing like
this secret Service agent doing like this, like what the
hell something's wrong there?

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):
I believe that's what you're referring to.

Speaker 3 (01:32:18):
Yes, but I've got the video of the Secret Service
agent in charge, Emery Roberts, raising up in the follow
up car and giving the.

Speaker 2 (01:32:25):
Cease and desist order to him. He turns and throws
his arms up in the air.

Speaker 3 (01:32:30):
Clint Hill, who's doing the same thing to Jackie's side,
falls back to the follow up car. He's the only
one that reacted that day. Agent Henry Rivka did not
participate in the motorcat And I'm just wondering why.

Speaker 1 (01:32:44):
That's not been brought out or brought it's been brought out,
It's been mulled over by investigators for decades.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):
I've never heard his name, but.

Speaker 3 (01:32:53):
Until I went to Dallas in ninety three and met
the gentleman who spoken with twenty six of them.

Speaker 2 (01:33:00):
Are you six agents there?

Speaker 1 (01:33:01):
I cannot say why those that particular incident happened, but
I would be careful in terms of I'm not trying
to dissuade you one way or another. I'm simply saying
i'd be careful. For example, the conspiracy theorist say, and
I am one of these in this instance who say
this is a little bit suspicious until I looked at

(01:33:22):
it further. When you see the car here, you see
that everybody's kind of close. Okay, they're kind of close
to the to the presidential limitine. But now at this
point you noticed the Clint Hill and the rest of
Secret Service agents. They're not with the car anymore. The
car is by itself and it's crawling at ten miles
an hour down Elm Street. And a lot of people said, ah,

(01:33:45):
the Secret Service agents left him. Well, the truth of
the matter is that they were just a very short
distance down the street from getting on the Stemens Freeway
and they weren't going to be on the bumper of
a car going sixty miles an hour to.

Speaker 2 (01:33:59):
Be in with a lot of people refuse to believe that.

Speaker 3 (01:34:05):
We've got a photographic evidence of the brake lights being on.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
Good So he did. He did crawl down the car?
Did crawl come.

Speaker 3 (01:34:14):
Toral graphic evidence of the driver looking back, seeing the
President receiving the throat shots and responding to him okay,
And and he's been trained to get out of line
and to gas it from there, but instead he turns around,
looks forward, and then turns back again and continues to
look the President until.

Speaker 2 (01:34:32):
He receives the head shot. I will say this, you
can explain it. I can't explain it. You've got it
on the video, right.

Speaker 1 (01:34:37):
But but he I will say this, He screwed the poach,
and he admitted it years later when he apologized privately
to Jackie Kennedy, Uh for what happened that day and
for who did it uh, Greer Bill, Yeah, the driver
of the limousine.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:34:51):
He apologized later to to missus Kennedy uh for not
only what happened in the car that day, but also
uh for for the seeming and difference that he showed
immediately afterwards. Nobody has brought forth any evidence to suggest uh.

Speaker 4 (01:35:08):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:35:09):
Let me put this, with credible evidence that the Secret
Service had anything to do with the assassination uh in
any way, shape or form.

Speaker 3 (01:35:20):
Go ahead, ultimate sacrifice. I know it's Freedom Information Acts
that have been released, documents of the Secret Service. That Chicago,
there was there was.

Speaker 2 (01:35:31):
There was an instant. There was an incident in Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:35:34):
Yes, and there's an incident in in and Saint Petersburg.

Speaker 2 (01:35:39):
Yes. There are plenty of attempts.

Speaker 1 (01:35:41):
But I will say this, if Kennedy had lived, nobody
would be talking about those attempts. Those attempts happen all
the time. Sometimes they're deadly serious, sometimes they're not.

Speaker 2 (01:35:49):
Uh, we'd never heard of those attempts.

Speaker 1 (01:35:51):
We don't hear any of the attempts against Barack Obama,
but I guarantee you we will if if he does.
Uh So, I'm not trying to argue that as simply
trying to say the one. I want to make this
very clear. I respect your opinion on this. I do
think there's some fishy things here, But what you're citing
there I have not found, in twenty plus years of research,

(01:36:12):
any evidence of substantiate that there was something screwy going
on with the US Secret Service?

Speaker 2 (01:36:20):
Is there anything.

Speaker 3 (01:36:23):
The point of the basic measurement Kenny's under out oej
last presidency.

Speaker 2 (01:36:29):
There's a lot of talk about that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:30):
Jankie talked about that and the arts of Slushnger interviews
in nineteen sixty four which were released not too long ago.

Speaker 2 (01:36:38):
He certainly didn't care for him, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:36:40):
Kennedy had made biting remarks about him, you know, and
you got to understand how the Kennedy's viewed Linda Johnson.
The Kennedy's are Boston, the Kennedy's are hard. LBJ is uncouth.
He's a hunter, which just irritates the hell out of them.
He went to a teacher's college, you know, in Sound West, Texas.
So you know, he's not the you know, a justify

(01:37:05):
or a good successor to to the Kennedys. So I
think there's some talk to it. Whether he stayed on
or not, I think, uh, we'll never know. My sense
is that he would have sailed on. Sorry, go.

Speaker 2 (01:37:22):
I what are I lived through this?

Speaker 7 (01:37:26):
So I remember all of these things, and I tried
to go to every lecture at those conspiracy adies, But
what is do you know anything about the conspiracy of it?

Speaker 2 (01:37:39):
Was actually the mom.

Speaker 7 (01:37:41):
Who where a hit because of the fact that Bobby
Kennedy of course had braided and was graded several.

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):
Prime mom bless.

Speaker 1 (01:37:54):
I will say this, the mom doesn't use uh ne'er
do wells like Lee Harvey Olson on the other the
mob doesn't use narrative wells like Lee Harry Oswald. On
the other hand, Jack Ruby does have tighs. Organized crime. Okay,
We've got audio tapes from the FBI from a Fello
and a bank robber in the late seventies and eighties

(01:38:15):
who was with Carlos Martello and in prison, and he's
talking about, Yeah, I got that little bastard, and that's
a quote. You have others who are caught on tape
talking about this, But you need to put that in
the broader context. I think maybe it's some small level,
but even there maybe doubtful. I'm not sure, but I

(01:38:36):
will say this, you got to remember at the time
there though. Part of the reason that we have these
conspiracy theories is because not only what happens on November
twenty second, but also because of what happens in the
two decades after that. The assassination timpon Reagan, the Church
Committee hearings, which reveals the you know, the family jewels
of the CIA, you know, the Frank Church's investigating finance work,

(01:39:00):
trying to kill Castro with poison pills and making his
beard fall out, you know, all this crazy stuff that
the government was involved in at this time. And so
if we know concretely that the this is happening at
the federal level in terms of the military, in terms
of CIA, in terms of the FBI etctera, and of
course Hoover's crimes, it's not a far fratt to think

(01:39:20):
that something's like that it's happening here. I think there's
some likelihood. I would like to think privately, not as
a historian, that there's probably some truth of that, not
in the sense that they orchestrated it, but in the
sense that they may have participated in some way.

Speaker 6 (01:39:38):
Yes, Jim and Garrison, I mean the Oliver Stone movies
based on his case based is there anything to that case?

Speaker 2 (01:39:47):
Have you looked into that case a legitimacy of but
I have I have.

Speaker 1 (01:39:53):
Let me say this privately, it has one of my
most my favorite movies. I drive my wife crazy. I
love that movie. Jim, It's just well done. As a historian,
Oliver Stone should be kicked in the butt because he
did just take theatrical license with thanks. He distorted facts

(01:40:16):
and he used and I agree with him on the
general overharching premises. Let's see about the conspiracy angle here.
On the other hand, he takes one of the most
flawed investigators of the nineteen sixties, who was coercing eyewitnesses,
who was bullying people, who was promising people parole, a
man who some suspected had some mental defects. Even his

(01:40:37):
own staff said he had severe problems and weren't in
agreement with things that he was doing. He published a
book called On the Trail the Assassins and Jim Garrison
that is the New Orleans District attorney who prosecuted clay Shaw.
For those of you who don't know, clay Shaw was
a New Orleans businessman with CIA ties that was her

(01:41:00):
by Richard Helms of the CIA in the mid seventies
after his death. I don't I think whatever thing is
that came out of the Garrison investigation were compromised fatally
by his own conduct.

Speaker 3 (01:41:17):
Yeah, so what your saved ones is that he was
on it though, I mean some of the stuff that
and I didn't say that the player well Olso was
hanging out there in the summer sixty two or sixty three, right.

Speaker 2 (01:41:29):
So I mean something was going on there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:41:32):
And that and that plays into it too, is that
you got Oswald there in the summer sixty three in
New Orleans. But he's also a native New Orleans. It's
a it's a familiar place when he was having trouble
in Dallas, uh and in Texas prior to the assassination.
But you have a man by the name of Guy Banister,

(01:41:55):
who was an FBI retiree, who is there. You have
Cuban exiles who are there. Operation Mongoose, which was controlled
by Robert Kennedy before Uh that was shut down. Uh,
they are their training and this and that swampy Sandy
area of you know, and.

Speaker 2 (01:42:16):
You left wing communists, that's what it doesn't make sense.
I'm sorry, Oh communist, shiit you throw a left wing
communist into the middle of that, right. There's been a
lot of speculation.

Speaker 1 (01:42:26):
My personal opinion on that where the conspiracy comes in
for me, as I think Lee Harvey Oswald had a
connection to the federal government and an intelligence role.

Speaker 4 (01:42:34):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:42:35):
But uh, we just don't We don't know because you
have Robert Oswald, his brother, who's alive today still talking
about my brother's guilty as hell. You know, you got
Marina Oswald who's gone back and forth over the years
on yes he's guilty, No he's not. We we just
don't know enough I think about Oswald. And the fact

(01:42:57):
is that there are hundreds of pages of documents that
are being classic helped classified by the federal government now
on Oswald, in addition to other issues regarding the assassination.

Speaker 2 (01:43:08):
They have never been released. We don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:43:10):
And we also know that many of those records beyond
what I just mentioned, were destroyed.

Speaker 2 (01:43:16):
They're not there anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:43:17):
We can't even get the president's brain that was removed
during autops So where's the brain, where's the where's the tissues?
You know, where did all this stuff go? Some of
this I think it's incompetence. Some of that stuff I
think is quite frankly, you know, amateur hour. Some of
that stuff is quite frankly. People be in thieves. You know,
people will be shocked, particularly at this period in time,

(01:43:40):
how much evidence disappeared in a murder case around the country.
You know, judges taking rifles, judges taking evidence, prosecutors keeping
key pieces of evidence as souvenirs. That's in part how
they busted the buyer and dealal deck with the killer
made their everts was they found a rifle and balby
the law father in law's house. He kept it from

(01:44:02):
the original tribe. You know. So I would like to
think somebody's got that brain sitting in a freezer, because
if that was possible, then we can we could prove
conclusively where that bullet came from, if we could ever
get our hands on it's the.

Speaker 2 (01:44:19):
Sell you want, because there wouldn't be much brain. You
need to examine the brain, but there wouldn't be much brain. Lunch.
There was half roughly half was gone.

Speaker 1 (01:44:28):
But uh, medical professionals have also told me you could
still tell if the brain was preserved properly.

Speaker 2 (01:44:34):
Yeah. So in terms of the point of entry, yes,
as I.

Speaker 4 (01:44:40):
Was saying, I rand a lot of the tests in
sure warrant commission it can play, Joe.

Speaker 2 (01:44:48):
Says, at one point is recorded there you can go.

Speaker 1 (01:44:51):
Online and good r Robert Robertsway, Hea, Well they told
me to say that.

Speaker 2 (01:45:01):
Then the guy is a job. But whoever was one
of the commissioned voy or says, now what say? What
you you think they told you? This is an indication
of how this offer was co worse. It was a
really bad quote.

Speaker 1 (01:45:17):
Yeah, that's part of the problem here is that you
have one of the worst investigations in American history, one
of the I mean, I can grab a bunch of
freshmen out of the criminal justice department at the East
Tennessee State University who can conduct a better investigation than
most of those guys. I mean, that's how poor it is.
But when you have something that's that poor in terms
of investigation, and you have people who have no curiosity

(01:45:41):
whatsoever asking questions like Carlen Spector, the late senator who
was one of the junior councils. Then it leads to
people believing things that weren't necessarily true. But what are
you going to do when you got an investigation that's
that's screwed up? I mean, there's no doubt about it,
just how bad it was, and they did not want

(01:46:02):
to show any real interest in really probing people in
terms of what happened there. They you know, they may
have gotten it right. Wait, wait, they.

Speaker 2 (01:46:13):
May have gotten it right, but it was a damn accident. Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:46:18):
Uh you know, And and I say and I say
that because we do have some other evidence out there
to suggest that shooting started much earlier than what the
Warrant Commission said or what the supruder film shows that
it may have started as early as when the car
was turning from.

Speaker 2 (01:46:35):
Houston on the ELM. So, you know, we just don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:46:39):
And it's because of the bad investigation, the conspiracy theorists,
the bad ones, the irresponsible ones, and there's a lot
of them. Uh, the thing is so mixed up now
we may never know what really happened.

Speaker 2 (01:46:52):
Yes, a slightly different topic. I guess I'm looking at this.
You can tell me.

Speaker 6 (01:47:00):
This is right round because this is the beginning of
a civil rights movement in this country, as well as.

Speaker 2 (01:47:04):
Maybe the War on poverty.

Speaker 1 (01:47:06):
Well, the civil rights movement began in nineteen fifty five
in a lot of people's minds with Montgomery and the
bus boycott. It really starts in World War Two what
we as historians called a long civil rights movement. And
when Kennedy faces it. Remember Kenny gets elected in part

(01:47:28):
because he gets so much of the black vote. Well
why did he get the black vote? He had been
stalking Nixon the whole time. Well, it was because Martin
Luther King's is sitting in a jail in Southern Georgia
when Sergeant Shriver, at the urging of Harris Wafer, tells
his brother in law, Jack, why don't you know I
none understand. We can't talk about this. We don't want

(01:47:50):
to antagonize the southerns But why don't you give Kreda
a call until her you sympathize with. Remember, Daddy King says,
I'm not voting for a Catholic boy. But then Jack
gets on the phone. He calls you know, Bobby gets
on the phone with the judge, gets him released and
there comes Daddy King at the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, saying,

(01:48:13):
I've got a whole suitcase of votes for that boy.
I've changed my opinion on Catholics being president. I mean,
so you know you have that going on. But then
Kennedy stalls and he does nothing because it does one
antagonize the Southerners. And it's remarkable, he says on the table,
you know, he says, I can't believe it. You know,

(01:48:34):
I'm gonna put my entire presidency on the line for
civil rights.

Speaker 2 (01:48:38):
Well, he said, the troops to Alabama.

Speaker 1 (01:48:41):
Yes, but it was an issue of law and orders
as much as an issue of morality, and the Kennedy's
went to extreme lengths to try to get the Civil
Rights Movement CORP snick, the NLA, CP others to to
stop with the street protests, to stop with sittings, because one,

(01:49:02):
it was antagonizing people and it was provoking violence, even
though the Southern movement was non Bob. On the other hand,
it was also an issue for them of law and order.
This let's litigate this in the courts. And that's Bobby
Kennedy's position. When Bobby, after Jack Kennedy's death, Bobby really

(01:49:24):
never changes in the sense of that cold hard political operator,
that power broker, but it becomes overly passionate in some
people's minds with civil rights because it's only when his
brother dies that he can understand some of the pain
and the heartache that African Americans are living. And that's
the Bobby we remember now. But during the presidency, in
the campaign, Bobby is just a cold hard political operator

(01:49:45):
saying this is gonna cost me X number of votes
in the South, knock this off.

Speaker 2 (01:49:50):
So I hope that in part answered, that was gonna
be my follow up question.

Speaker 6 (01:49:54):
Actually the part two, if you doze that I read
that Bobby Kennedy kind of found so after Jack's death
and when he was approaching the sixty eight campaign, that
he was much more impassionate about civil.

Speaker 2 (01:50:08):
Rights and those issues.

Speaker 1 (01:50:10):
Yes, and the poor and you know, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, Yes,
and natural That is the subject of a new book
that I'm working on for the fiftieth anniversary of Bobby's
death in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2 (01:50:23):
In fact, I wrote my master's thesis on Robert Kennedy.
And there are two different.

Speaker 1 (01:50:26):
Men in that sense, and he's much more willing to
go out on a political limb, in part because there's
no Jack to protect, but also because he can feel
that pain. That's where you see Bobby's down there in
Mississippi with these young black children with distended stumps, just disgusting.
They're starving to death, and he's sitting there rubbing their
faces and you could just see the emotion pouring out

(01:50:48):
of him. And he becomes connected, I mean, by sixty
eighties running around with Rosie gear and you know, you know,
all kinds of other people, and he really feels connected.
He even told somebody once, you know, before the death,
you don't know how lucky you were to be born poor.
But he actually sat after that, you know, you don't
know how lucky you are to be born black, you know,

(01:51:10):
I mean, he identified with them. Now, Johnson Kennedy had
been terribly impacted by Jack Kennedy by the issue of
poverty that he saw in West Virginia, and he was
planning on doing something regarding that. But LBJ was able
to push through the war on Holliday. And contrary to

(01:51:30):
what Tea partiers and Republicans and others say, the truth
of the matter is is that You don't see that
type of nonsense anymore in the United States of kids
with distended stocks. You just don't see that anymore. You
see kids starving. I can find you a kid within
a ten mile radius to start. It's not the same thing.
It's not as systemic, it's not as widespread, it's not

(01:51:51):
as problematic that these kids now, even if they're going
hunger part of the time, to not going hunger because
of some federal programming. Isn't free lunch or free breakfast
or you know f f uh free after school?

Speaker 4 (01:52:02):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:52:03):
And it's not concentrated at like it was then in
the black community, particularly in the Deep South.

Speaker 2 (01:52:09):
Anybody else? Yes? Have you? Uh? This has kind of
up in the last couple of years. A lady of
her normal name right now, but she wrote a book
and things of Lee and and me. You heard of that?
Are you talking about Ruth Payne or.

Speaker 4 (01:52:25):
She?

Speaker 2 (01:52:25):
Are you talking about, uh Priscilla in uh Nework?

Speaker 1 (01:52:29):
Oh, I know what you're talking about. I know what
you're talking about. I I it's not coming to mind
at the moment. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker 6 (01:52:41):
But anyway I've seen I'm notating the border across yeah
her in an.

Speaker 1 (01:52:46):
Interview of her, Yeah Lee Lee. Oswald is a sad kid.
He's twenty four years old. He's you know, unpopular. He
comes from a really bad background, uh, in terms of
his family, and it's particularly his mother. He's never been
really successful at anything. He's been attracted by Communism.

Speaker 4 (01:53:07):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:53:07):
They called him Oswaldovich, you know when he was in
the Marines. Because he's always talking about Marx and Lennon
and things like that. I think he's a terribly sad figure.
I was in the supermarket a few days ago. I
saw tabloid saying Oswald's body is no longer in the casket.

Speaker 2 (01:53:23):
What happened? You know, So he still continues to fascinate.

Speaker 1 (01:53:29):
Marina, on the other hand, I'm not sure what to
make of her other than I think she's a very
sad woman who's put in a very bad position. She
fell in love with a man who became abusive. She
fell in love with a man who couldn't hold down
a job she held. She married a man who instantly
made her surname and the surname of her children infamous

(01:53:51):
to this very day. You know, June and the other child,
you know, that they sired together.

Speaker 2 (01:53:59):
You know that woman. She makes a very interesting statement
of her interview. Oswald is seen.

Speaker 6 (01:54:08):
In northern Louisiana with uh they believe, with play Shaw
and another guy.

Speaker 2 (01:54:16):
When you see it again in Murgershop with a woman
and she claims she's the woman with him.

Speaker 8 (01:54:21):
At the murder Shaw and there was a that's that
the back seat and this is a car of of
of some people they knew that had ten kids that had.

Speaker 2 (01:54:29):
That pass in that and there they would borrow that car. Sure,
So I think there's some there's some that she did
actually work. They have the records of her working uh
in the same place at the coffee company in New Orleans.

Speaker 8 (01:54:42):
But she's come up just recently and the some of
her stuff sounds a little bit you know to see.

Speaker 1 (01:54:48):
Yeah, and that's the problem. You have people who had
some type of very little connection to something and they
tried to.

Speaker 2 (01:54:55):
Make money off of it.

Speaker 1 (01:54:56):
I mean, you had a lot of that, especially beginning
in the nineteen seventy when Judith Campbell Exner wrote a
tell all book about her affair with Jack Kennedy, and
then all these people came out not only on the
affairs but on the assassination itself. One mistress of Lyndon
Johnson claims that, excuse me that, you know LBJ told
her today of you know, Kennedy will never bother me

(01:55:20):
again after today, you know, you know, I mean, so you.

Speaker 2 (01:55:26):
Don't get much greeness, Madam Brown.

Speaker 1 (01:55:27):
Right, No, No, I know this is not right to say,
but I will say this. A person who will engage
in the adultery is.

Speaker 2 (01:55:41):
Not the best character witness. I'll just put that one.
You never know what will.

Speaker 1 (01:55:51):
Happen when you drag twenty dollars through a trailer park.
I shouldn't have said that.

Speaker 2 (01:56:00):
I'm sorry. I have strong feelings on that.

Speaker 1 (01:56:07):
My my grand students will remind me of this moment
next week and find out. Yeah, I will get knocked
on my office door tomorrow. Are there any other questions
I can answer, or any other comments that I can answer?

Speaker 2 (01:56:24):
Uh, go ahead, this inter se from a local perspective,
I can. I was in restaurant and a lot of
professions like saw there and there.

Speaker 4 (01:56:35):
Was a beauty profession probably sixty nineties.

Speaker 2 (01:56:40):
Yeah, that was probably one of the three. The anniversary
in the shooting told me this actual what he said.

Speaker 8 (01:56:48):
He said he was working in the hotel in New
Orleans in nineteen sixty three, and he personally saw a
boom one son and.

Speaker 2 (01:57:00):
He he connected this dude, he can be assassinated. Sure,
And have you talked that now or were you on
the idea?

Speaker 6 (01:57:08):
Who?

Speaker 2 (01:57:08):
I forget his name. I don't think of that. There's
two of them I have mixed up. One was some
woman that his name, but he want but he was
a beautic professor.

Speaker 1 (01:57:16):
Then and say it, say that first, that very first
part again, cause I I'm the the part where you're
talking about, uh, young college professors. He was.

Speaker 2 (01:57:27):
He was a college professor.

Speaker 7 (01:57:28):
Kid.

Speaker 2 (01:57:29):
Yeah, I know this is about nineteen late nineties, ninety
eight years off. I don't remember who you are.

Speaker 8 (01:57:34):
And he told me he had worked as a younger
guy in New Orleans in there and.

Speaker 2 (01:57:40):
He s personally saw.

Speaker 4 (01:57:41):
All these guys Hoover, Yes, I know, I got him
a doctor burn that mixed up. I don't think it
wasn't around sixty time.

Speaker 2 (01:57:53):
I know who you're talking about. Yeah, and he he's
he's not there.

Speaker 1 (01:57:57):
Uh, but no, I have a prob Yeah, no, I
have not talking about I remember who you're talking about vaguely. No,
but I did not talk to him in regard to
the Kennedy assassination at all. Right, you may may have
not told about it, holding well, And we find that

(01:58:19):
too that a lot of people claim things that weren't there.
I mean, for example, when I go around here, I
hear people talking glowingly about Kennedy. You know, Kennedy is
Kennedy that you know, And then the older generations, you know,
say yeah, my pappy voted for Kennedy, and I'll say
maybe probably not. This whole area went for Nixon and strongly, so,

(01:58:44):
I mean, there was no if Ham's about about it.
They went for Nixon. But that was the same thing
that was all around the United States. Kennedy wins forty
nine percent of the popular vote in nineteen sixty. In
nineteen sixty four and sixty five, polling shows in sixty
five percent of Americans say they voted for Kennedy.

Speaker 2 (01:59:04):
You know, Yeah, I was there.

Speaker 1 (01:59:06):
I voted for him. You know, I helped pull the lever,
you know, so you do have some of that. There
any other questions or comments

Speaker 2 (01:59:18):
About movie library and closing, all right, thank you, have
a great nu