Mark Shaw | The 60th anniversary of JFK's assassination: A retrospective

Welcome to the Commonwealth Club. I'm George Hammond, president of the Humanities Forum, which organized tonight's event. We have done over 1,000 shows since the pandemic started and have now regained our live audience, which we are very happy to see. And we also welcome everyone on YouTube to our live stream to watch. This will be the fifth program the Commonwealth Club has run with Mark Shaw. It's been seven years since the first one we made and the last two have been YouTube sensations. More than a million each. And we're here to discuss today the

60th

anniversary

of the JFK

assassination

and also the new research that's recently emerged in

mark

eting.

As I mentioned in the last article, Mark has become a kind of crowdsourcing base for all kinds of research. People give him information that he has. Not all of it is useful, but some of it is extremely useful. And we will be talking about one of those new useful sources. We mentioned it briefly last time, but there's a lot more information since then. So we are here to discuss something very important and very dear to my heart, of course, and that is JFK's life and what happened to him and also the fact that he simply did not get justice for the crime that was committed against him. .

I mean, the

assassination

just didn't accomplish what almost a normal person, whether he was president of the United States, a normal person, would have been able to see what had happened better than that. Mark, welcome back to the Commonwealth Club. Thanks Jorge. Thank you. And I got a new hat for this performance, but thanks for having me again. Yes that's fine. So one thing we can maybe do to set it up, since we're talking about 60 years ago and everyone watching it isn't a baby boomer. You know, maybe half the people are. But a lot of people are not very aware of what the cultural context of his presidency was and what was happening at that time.

So why don't you give a little background information on that? Just brief ideas. Well, I'm kind of an accidental historian. I never imagined I would get involved in all this. Everyone knows where he was when JFK died, and so do I. I was a freshman at Purdue University trying to fight my way to graduation. I think that was my fifth year there or something like that. But I remember it. But I was never very interested. And when the Warren Commission said it was Oswald alone, I was fine with that. But you have to remember that in the 1970s, a very violent 1970s, I wrote to George just a few things that we can remember from those days.

Of course, John Kennedy was elected president. We had the Cuban missile crisis. The Berlin Wall was erected. James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi. There was civil unrest, if you remember, and all the riots. Obviously, JFK was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became president. The Civil Rights Act had been passed after the first space walks, Malcolm X and Malcolm X died. Martin Luther King was assassinated. And even Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. That's how Marilyn Monroe died. And I think, as I've said in my presentations and in my books, that she was murdered in 1962. So those were kind of dark days in those few years from probably 1961 or two to '68 or '69.

And so that's then the context of what JFK and his assassination were that fit with all that. Now, in your books you talk a lot about JFK and the Kennedy family, the difficulties they have, the kind of family culture that doesn't work. But today we will focus on the promise that he gave to the people, the feeling of hope, the fact that in his inaugural speech he reached out to the people to do something. And that was a very effective thing to do. And I think today's audience should understand it in the sense that he was the first person who is not from the post-World War II generation because he himself was very involved in World War II.

But he was much, much younger than the leaders before. And it turns out that we now have even greater leaders. And there is a spirit of hope when the generation passes on to another group of leaders who were not leaders. Well, we won't say how old he is, but yes, yes. So. So why don't you talk about that part of the effect on young people and even young adults and even middle-aged adults of what he did? Well, he was an inspiration. We can talk about many of the works, many of the negative aspects of John F.

Kennedy. But when he was elected president, even when he was a senator, you know, and with Jackie and Camelot and all that, there was hope that he was going to make a change in America from what he had been. He was a war hero, you know, 109 years old, all wounded. You know, you looked at it. No one was ever more charismatic than John F. Kennedy, who was a little embarrassed that they put my photo next to his because, you know, I'm no John F. Kennedy Jr. But, you know, I think we all feel that there was a lot of hope there.

And he married Jackie and they had two young children. And, you know, you have to remember with these deaths that even when I talked about the others, there's surely a sense of loss. What that particular person lost with JFK he never played with the little kids, you know, John, John and his daughter and all the things he could have done as president. I mean, we hoped he would get us out of Vietnam. Him and Bobby Kennedy. And one of the biggest efforts of his while they were both alive was the Cuban missile crisis and all that.

And then, you know, he lost, he lost all that in his life at a very young age. You know, in his forties. It shouldn't have happened. It should never have happened. In fact, I'm going to talk about this gentleman that I mentioned before who fights for justice and he had warnings about the fact that this could happen to JFK if he went to Dallas. So it's a tragic death and his family lost him. But we lost a president who had a lot. Whether you agreed with him or not. We had high hopes for him. And that's what a leader is.

I think you'd probably call him a leader. From the country. People believed in him. And then he's just tragic. And the most tragic thing for me is that just as when Marilyn Monroe died, I think she was murdered, and Dorothy Kilgallen died, who will speak of my spiritual guide, none of these three got the justice they deserved with an investigation in that sense. It shouldn't have happened to any of them. It's sad that it was like that. But especially with JFK, boy, from the moment he was killed in Dallas. J. Edgar Hoover and the people we talked about at the Warren Commission were never going to let the truth survive, that's for sure.

Alright. So let's talk about the new information they've obtained about the dissident members of the Warren Commission, because it's not something that's not known. I mean, it's not secret information, but it's just not known if they were that strong in their dissent and what deal they thought they made, which didn't happen. So why don't we look at that? Then you met and talked to Maurice Wolff. So why don't you tell people who Maurice Wolff is? Maurice Wolff is still alive, but he is almost 90 years old, right? Yes, he is a little sick. Health. He has been incredible to me.

And I'm a little remiss because I've written six books about the JFK assassination. At one point I put them all in one file. I've written almost 950,000 words on this. I never had any ideas. I started with this book, Melvin Belli, King of the Courtroom. I practiced law with Mr. Belli in the 1980s. When he died, I was very interested in that he was a pretty mean, bombastic guy, you know, a bombastic guy who was larger than life. People remember him for many things. He represented, you know, the Rolling Stones and Tammy Faye Baker, Errol Flynn. He sued all the pharmaceutical people and everything else.

But while working on this book I discovered that he was Jack Ruby's lawyer. I never knew that before. It took me back to the 1960 election show. I wrote The Poison Patriarch about Joe Kennedy rigging the 1960 election, using the mobster, specifically Jeune Khana, and a guy named Marcello in New Orleans to win that election because they were going to lose Illinois and W.V. And that is more or less accepted as a historical fact. Yes, that's the point. Yes, it is for most people, not all. So while he was, you know, what happens with a researcher like me, there are certain moments when you hear something that triggers in your mind some way to go in another direction.

While I was working on the Melvin Belli book, a friend of his who I interviewed said, Well, you know, Melvin Bell, I knew Dorothy Kilgallen and I said, Well, she was on What's My Line, which was CBS. television program. She was best known for that. We'll talk a little. And he said no. He said he was a very good friend of his. And when she died, he said to me: Well, they've killed Dorothy. Now they will go after Jack Ruby. And I thought, wait a minute, what's that all about? So I started researching Dorothy Kilgallen and wrote the reporter Who Knew Too Much, which had become a bestseller.

George knows I've had millions of views on YouTube from my performances and all that. This is Dorothy Kilgallen. It's not about me because they are so fascinated with her life. So I wrote that book. Then I discovered the Warren Commission transcripts and Dorothy Kilgallen, the interest in all of that, and I wrote Denial of Justice. So I decided: Okay, I told my wife, I'm going to quit. But then I discovered that I could connect the deaths of Marilyn Monroe in '62, JFK in '63, and Dorothy in '65. And that's what Collateral Damage did. I talked about the five programs again, and when we did the Denial of Justice book, we said in the final chapter of Mark Shaw's report, this is how we described it.

Absolutely. Totally inaccurate. But when you get this information, you feel a responsibility. As a historian, Georges tells his story and knows what it is about. And I'm very glad that he invited me to come speak here. So I was going to stop again, but then I ran into this man, Maurice Wolfe, not figuratively, but I ran into him or literally, whatever. And this is what happens. People watch my presentations on YouTube, mostly here at the Commonwealth Club or at the Allen Public Library, which is near Dallas. And what they do is they go in there, they see this, and then they contact me and I get emails or phone calls or something like that.

Here's some advice. Here's some advice, here's some advice. This will happen with this presentation when it is on YouTube. I'll find out something. So it's kind of surprising because I've become the go-to person when new information becomes available. And frankly, I'm always surprised that others haven't found that information. And the information that you are going to hear tonight that has never been heard anywhere before is a good example of that, because even I missed it and even made a mistake in fighting for justice, which is the last book that I will correct with the pocket one, because new information came to me and here is who Maurice Wolfe was.

There is one afternoon when Lou meets my wife. I got this email that said: I'm Maurice Wolfe. I knew Dorothy Kilgallen and just saw her presentation at the Dallas Public Library. It went viral and he saw it and said, I saw you did something with Dorothy Kilgallen. That's why I always keep track of these. I answer every email because I never know what's going to happen. And I called this gentleman who lives in Florida and he said, Well, yes, Mr. Show, I want to get in touch with you because you knew Dorothy Kilgallen. And when that happens, my ears perk up because that was a long time ago, right?

Alright. A long time ago. 60, 60 years. Well. And he said, okay, I just want to tell you a few things about myself. He said, first of all, just to give you an idea of ​​who I am, I graduated from Yale. I went to work for Bobby Kennedy in the White House when he was attorney general. I was with the attorney general when we worked on the Civil Rights Act, and I actually wrote Title Two of that Civil Rights Act. We used the Commerce Clause and he gave me all these details to hopefully desegregate and so on. He said: And also, Mr.

Shaw, I must tell you that Robert Kennedy and JFK trusted me enough to be his interlocutor while he was riding his bicycle. I figure I'm sitting there, I can't record this, so I'm writing as fast as I can because this is history. This is history. He was a recent law graduate between 25 and 27 years old. That's how it is. And he rides back and forth between the brothers because they suspect that he was carrying messages back and forth, secret messages because they believe they knew that J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, was tapping his phones.

Now, think for a moment about what was happening in our country, that the director of the FBI could not be trusted not to tap the phones of the president and the attorney general. Morris then went on to tell me about his work with RFK and down to the details. I interviewed him once last year and again in September. It's very, very brilliant, very coherent. And he's very good with details. For example, he told me, you know, when he walked into Bobby Kennedy's office, there he was with his shirt sleeves rolled up and no jacket tied back.

And how he would just lean back in his chair, you know, and how his chin would move a little when he was really nervous. I mean,He could give me all those details. And for the historian it is important that the person gives a good explanation of what it is about. Then he said, Well, I continued working for Robert Kennedy, and he told me, one thing I want to remember. He said there is a great rivalry between the two brothers, especially JFK. I thought Bobby Kennedy was getting too much publicity. And so they argued about that kind of thing, you know, and that's the idea.

You know, Dorothy Kilgallen was having dinner in Dallas when JFK, you know, after JFK, JFK was assassinated and she investigated. You know, my main sources with that kind of stuff really work well that way because I wasn't there. But she was. Well, now I have Morris Wolf who was there and all these great experts and authors and all those who speculate and all that. I don't have to do that because I have my primary sources and I think people admire me for that. I'm not going to fool you with what I'm going to discover. Second hand.

Good. And Morris Wolf, in addition to knowing both Kennedys, I mean, knowing them so well that she was his go-between, then she was a legislative assistant to Senator John Sherman Cooper, who was a Republican from Kentucky who was on the Warren Commission. That's how it is. So and before that, Morris one day told me that he had represented Raoul Wallenberg. And I don't know if you know who he is, but he is the Hungarian Jew who is believed to have saved over 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust. And he wrote this book about it. So I'm just thinking, Oh my gosh, it's amazing that I have this gentleman who is right in the thick of it all.

Then Bobby Kennedy was leaving and Kennedy said, what are you going to do? And he said: Well, I don't know. And he said, Well, Senator John Sherman Cooper, who is a good friend of ours, the Kennedys, and I have photographs of John Sherman Cooper with his wife, with JFK and Jackie, all the friendship they had. Jackie Kennedy said that. COOPER was a man of integrity, like Abraham Lincoln, almost like a father to her, all that. So I'm learning more about John Sherman Cooper thanks to Morris Wolf. And he said, you know, Bobby Kennedy said that John Sherman Cooper needs a legislative assistant.

He's the one left and he's about to investigate the JFK assassination, and you would be perfect to work for him. So Morris says, you know, Mr. Wolf says, I went to work for him. And I have to tell you that you don't know what's going to happen when someone talks to you and tells you all this. And then he finally tells me, and I have to tell you, I'm remiss because I never looked into the Warren Commission enough, like everyone else who was baffled by J. Edgar Hoover. And we'll talk about that in a minute. You know, I just think that's what happened.

Only Oswald made sense. Alright. So I never looked into it. And I should have, and that's my fault. Then he starts talking to me about the possibilities that exist with the Warren Commission. And if you have to remember, we have to go back a little. What did J. J. Edgar Hoover do when JFK died? Well. The first thing he had to decide was, wait a minute, are they going to hold me accountable for not stopping the assassination of the president? Then you are immediately in Protect mode. And what does he do? Shout out to Oswald alone.

He tells the Justice Department: We're only going to examine Oswald. We want to remember this. We want to convince the American public that it was just Oswald and nothing more. And to control that, he does two things. Number one, he goes ahead and confiscates all documents from the Dallas Police Department that have to do with JFK's death. And second, quickly, without any authority, he sends JFK's body to Washington, D.C. for the autopsy because he says, hey, it's not a state crime to kill the president of the United States. That was the terrible lie. Was. And in Dallas, Dallas, the attorney general of Texas was going to investigate the case and Congress was going to investigate the case.

Everyone wanted to investigate the case. Well, he can't let that happen, Kenny, because he also has a lot of skeletons in his closet in terms of what happened. Then he decides: he Okay, well, what is there to do here? Let's get a group of people together. We will have Earl Warren as head of the Warren Commission. And Earl Warren was the chief justice at the time, which is interesting because, you know, why would the chief justice ever be on a committee for anything? That's how it is. Exactly. So what does he do? He starts choosing people to be there.

The first one that really struck me was, you know, why he appointed Allen Dulles to the commission. Well, Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA. JFK had fired two years earlier. Why is he on the commission? Well, we'll talk about why he's perfect. LBJ is there. Well, LBJ is perfect because he is the new president and he will surely go along with whatever Hoover wants to do. Then he chooses Jerry Ford and the commentary from him that I found on audio tapes on the Internet, on YouTube, you can find them. They talk about the fact that they want Jerry Ford there because he's the old cliché that he can't think and chew gum at the same time.

But that's why they want him to be able to be controlled. You see, Hoover wanted to control everything he throws in there. Then Senator Richard Russell, who is a Democrat from Georgia, and Senator John Sherman Cooper, who is from Kentucky, are like George said, believing that they will be authentic to the commission, but they can be controlled. He can't name Kennedy. So he has Katzenbach, who is the acting attorney general, as an unofficial adviser to the commission. And we'll talk about why that happened. Exactly. So he assembles the commission from him and then starts with them, basically ordering them more than anything else.

We're just going to investigate Oswald. Well. So I'm Maurice Wolff. And what does he tell me? Well, he says, you know, Mark, and this is where everything is so detailed. We drove. He was a very tall man, but he fit in my Saab. And we went to the commission hearings together. And I'll tell you what, I just want to scream. No one has ever sat on the Warren Commission. They had a code of silence that J. J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson made them sign that they would never talk about the Warren Commission. And it never was for all those years and all those years.

And here's a guy who says, "I was there." I was at the hearings. I sat in the last row. I watched the staff do most of the questioning of witnesses. And why was that? Because. And not the members. Because Hoover, again, could control the staff. All he wants is Oswald alone, because if Oswald is just given to people and they chew him up and absorb him, then they will never investigate anything else, especially to hold him accountable. Then Maurice Wolfe says: Well, we did that. And, by the way, there are some things that Senator Hoover told me and I wrote them down as quickly as I could.

The members of the commission already know about Jack Ruby's connection to organized crime, but they don't want to touch it. Jack Ruby, of course, shot Oswald. He is more than Oswald, but Hoover and Chief Justice Earl Warren continue to push Oswald alone. Conclusion. You know, some of these are very disturbing. Our new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, now wants to cover it up and move on. The members of the commission want to bury the truth under a pile of stones. And Earl Warren is acting like a third world dictator. LBJ Cooper told Maurice Wolff: Put me on the committee because I am a distinguished senator, respected by my colleagues.

My appearance will give the impression that the investigation will be beyond reproach. But there is something very wrong with the investigation. Commission members say Oswald's conclusion is good for God and country, but there is internal corruption and I don't know why commission members don't hold hearings. The staff is doing it. And this was one that really impacted me to make sure the truth prevails. I have shared Jack Rudy's dubious testimony before the Warren Commission with journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, a woman of truth, and during the photograph of the commission members. That's it, right there. Check it out.

Look at it closely. During the forum, committee members hid behind Senator Albert Hale Boggs because they knew the final report was not true. He is second from the right. Look at it. He hides behind Boggs. Look at the expression on his face. Well. And recently, let's talk about crowdsource. I've looked at that. Damned. I guess I'll say damn photography 100,000 times. Well. And I never saw Allen Dulles' expression, his face. Allen is standing right next to Senator Cooper. He's looking at Cooper like, why? Did you know? What are you doing? Because he's going to know that Cooper wants a dissent, a minority report on the Warren Commission's final report.

And that's where we're going to get into the new evidence with that. That's what Morris told me. Marshal. And did he tell you that about what Senator John Sherman Cooper told him? Exactly. He had this role and he felt like he was being used on the commission. That's Morris's evidence. Now we have other evidence that has arrived, right? Yes. And I missed it. I missed all this. I looked at the oral history of Senator John Sherman Cooper at the University of Kentucky. He also wanted the University of Georgia. But some of the material I didn't find wasn't really my fault, because, you know, I felt like my research was good.

But the real gold was in Senator Richard Russell, the oral history of him at the University of Georgia. So this is what happened. You know, it's amazing. Dorothy Kilgallen took me to Morris Wolfe. Morris Wolfe then took me to Senator Richard Russell. And what I discovered was that he had made a mistake in fighting for justice because I thought this memo here was written by John Sherman Cooper. Was not. It was written by Senator Richard Russell. Now, if you want to talk a little bit about a really respected man, as respected as John Sherman Cooper was, it has to be Richard Russell in those days, God willing, we could find him again.

It didn't really matter if they were Democrats or Republicans. They were really looking for what was good for America. And they both worked across the hall. They took up unpopular causes and all that. For God's sake, John Sherman, Coover became involved in the civil rights movement. Well, you can imagine that wasn't too big a deal in Kentucky, right? For republican? No, by a Republican. But look, they were looking for the truth. And Russell, again, good friend of JFK. And. And they were distinguished men. They were men of integrity, just as Dorothy Kilgallen was a woman of integrity.

So here you have this memo. We are on December 5, 1963, just two weeks after his arrest. Exactly. So this is what Russell wrote. Something strange is happening. W You can imagine who he is. Warren and Katzenbach, who is the acting attorney general, know everything about the FBI. And they are. And apparently others plan to show Oswald just one of them. This is an untenable position for me. I must within I must insist on external advice. So I knew right away that Richard Russell was obviously having problems with what he was investigating by the commission. Well. And again, I must add, right now I found and have it in Fighting for Justice, a letter from Senator Cooper asking for his resignation from the commission.

And the reason he didn't do it was because he didn't send it. But what he was saying there was that he was very disappointed because he had not been told when the commission was interviewing certain witnesses like Oswald's brother and others so that he could be there. Just think about that. Now, that's J. Edgar Hoover manipulating the commission so that there will never be anything other than Oswald alone. Okay, so we come to this document that I didn't know existed, and I found it in his oral history at the University of Georgia. He is now a senator from Kentucky.

But he did this oral history at the University of Georgia. Yes. Along with the records of Senator Richard Russell. That's how it is. Yes. And these are very disturbing documents. They had never appeared before. Imagine that 60 years from now, I'm the one who found you. Come on. I have no doubt that all six. In fact, you will discover that they actually destroyed documents with these points in front of it. What Russell believed forced him to hold a final executive session of the Warren Commission. His main agenda was to present his prepared dissent and refuse to sign the commission's report unless the dissent was included.

After raising his concern, Russell was joined in dissent by Senator John Sherman Cooper and, to a lesser extent, Representative Boggs, whom he never heard of in an oral history conducted late in his life. Cooper recalled that Russell's well-reasoned opinion greatly influenced Cooper's own conclusions. Like Russell, Cooper was impressed by Governor Connally's strong and convincing testimony and was therefore willing to follow Russell's lead in rejecting the single-book Bullet Theory, which made no sense at the time. And today it doesn't make any sense. Cooper was apparently surprised by Russell's emphatic refusal to sign the statement categorically denying that a bullet had hit either Kennedy or Connally, although he did not go so far as to prepare a written dissent.

Cooper was willing to join Russell on a minority report. I also find it interesting because Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren was in charge of the commission. He should be used to dissenters on the Supreme Court, he always files dissents from him. So you have this evidence, this is from Senator Cooper in the oral history of him given to the University of Georgia. The one fromSenator Russell, you know, in Senator Russell's files. But backing up what Senator Russell had said, because now we have other information from Senator Russell. Yes. And what I often forget to say is that when you are a historian, you always seek to confirm different accounts of things.

George knows that he, as a historian, wants to find those things. Well, what does all this get me? Confirms that? What, what Maurice Wolff told me, right? This demonstrates the disturbing effect of what was happening at the commission with Oswald alone. Focus on everything. And you're probably wondering, well, why didn't Cooper and Russell talk about this publicly? Well, they had the code of silence again. Well? And he was finally sharing the things with Maurice Wolff that it took Maurice Wolff 60 years to tell anyone. And he told me. So what happened then is I want to delve deeper into this.

So I went to see what happened when Senator Russell learned that the dissent was not there. Think about this. This is very, very important. For 60 years, the Oswald verdict has survived only because the Warren Commission said so. Just think if the dissent, the minority report questioning the Oswald verdict alone, the silver bullet theory, all of that would have been in that final report. This is what could happen and this is why. J. Edgar Hoover couldn't let that be in the final report, and it wasn't. They said it would be that way. Earl Warren, LBJ. Hoover promised that he was never in that final report.

And you see what it is, if you think about it, it's common sense. Because, what would have happened if that dissidence had been there? It would have changed everything. Well. There would have been more investigation. Maybe Congress would have investigated, maybe the state of Texas would have investigated, and as I said the other day to someone who is a big proponent of, let's say he said, the CIA was involved, I said, well, you never had a chance. . Let the Warren Commission prove that because they were not going to investigate it. They weren't going to investigate the mafia.

They weren't going to ask the Russians, or the Cubans, or anyone else. And he said, I never thought about that. And I said: Well, neither do I. But that was the effect of it. Well. So I decided to look into Senator Richard Russell more, because he was a very important part of this. So after the commission's final report was delivered to the president, I found this in the archives. The commission was dissolved and members had little reason to revise the final draft. If Russell had done this, he would have noticed immediately. It contained no mention of any disagreement.

The senator resumed his duties in Congress, assuming that his opinion had been documented and taken into account. Now, three years pass before a Senate investigator, Harold Weisberg, attempts to gain access to all of the Warren Commission transcripts. In a letter dated May 20, 1968, dated August 8, 1968, addressed to the Archivist of the United States, Informed Why? Weisberg had discovered that a verbatim transcript of the September 18 meeting did not even exist. You know, that was the archivist who told Weisberg, who was the researcher. Good. That there is no transmission of that. There is no transcript of it. There was a document indicating the structure of the account of the general matters being carried out, but nowhere was the disagreement of Russell's defense mentioned.

Rather, Russell's attempt to document his doubts for history had been thwarted. And then it's very interesting how these things happen during a chance meeting with Russell in June of '68. Now, four years after the publication of the final report in September of 1964. Weisberg told the center that a draft of the Warren Commission report with dissidents no longer existed and that the official transcript also recorded Russell's doubts. Those of Cooper and Boggs had been removed from the historical record, meaning Russell's expected exceptions to the final draft of the report were not mentioned. They basically destroyed the document and that's how they deceived him.

Early in the commission's life, members decided that Ward and Paul would register executive applications and establish a company. During the September 18 meeting, Russell recalled the presence of a woman in the room and assumed she was the official stenographer. However, he was not, as survey of Ward and Paul's records show that the last session the firm was billed for was a September 15 deposition. It is therefore possible to assume that the presence of a stenographer was intended to deceive Russell and other dissidents into assuming that the meeting was being transcribed as usual. They went to that point to deceive them.

They thought they were recording it and it wasn't. The presence of the manipulated document. The transcripts prove that someone, probably Warren Commission general counsel Lee Rankin, assured that there would be no record of dissent in the ranks. When confronted with unequivocal evidence of his deception, Russell was shocked and horrified. Having worked in Washington for decades, he could never imagine they would envision such a deal. Russell returned to Georgia in 1970 to film his farewell speech to his constituents. He says goodbye. He knew. He knew he was dying of lung cancer. Taking the last opportunity to make his position known, he clearly stated that he was dissatisfied with several aspects of the report.

He told the interviewer that the inquiry refused to sign the report until they added the conclusion. The clause, the dissent. But he was never completely convinced that Oswald planned and acted together on his behalf without consulting the consulate. And that is what the majority of the Commission wanted to find. And then we get to this, you know, the evidence was evaluated by a second body five years after his death and the commission was founded with deficiencies. Well, the findings of the House Select Committee on Murders in 76 were shocking. The commission had done its job too well.

And then what happened is that, although there have been skeptics and critics, as the FBI director foresaw during the commission appearance, most were dismissed as paranoid lunatics and conspiracy theorists. While the dissent of a figure as prominent as Richard Russell might have given some legitimacy to several critics, most had been too effective in guiding public opinion. The wide variety of books and films proposed endless conspiracies and other theories that had not lulled a public increasingly fed up with finding new findings. Then they closed it and buried it. And I missed it. And everyone who's talked about the murder and written about it, the so-called experts and all that, never found out this first time he's been exposed, it's right now.

Now, Mark, we talked about what we wanted to do tonight at this particular time. Yes. We have that. And we're not going to try to answer the questions of what really happened. What we're trying to show with your investigation is that there were two very, very respected senators who disagreed with the Warren Commission report and therefore there must be some other answer or probably some other answer. And we don't even know if that's true or not. But it seems that way. And then I think the next part we want to talk about is where did Dorothy Kilgallen get this from?

Then you heard the information that Senator John Cooper gave her transcripts that she wasn't supposed to share with anyone because he thought she would follow up on that as a reporter. So now we're in Dorothy Kilgallen territory as a reporter. And where did this research lead? Where did she think and how did she fit into it? We've talked about it before, but I think it's an important part of this whole picture not to come to an answer, but to say: Well, where did this journalist who was trusted by the dissidents try to get this information? ? Then the Warren Commission report is published and it is as false as possible.

Here is your report. Well. It's worthless. That? I'm sorry. Do it. It is absolutely useless. Sorry, Doug, but it's worthless. There is only one piece of humor in this entire event. So that was it. Well, I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry. I get very, very angry about this. I feel very frustrated by this. Three people died here. That should never have died. One was Marilyn Monroe. Bobby Kennedy was an accessory to her death. If he had been prosecuted with all the evidence, the JFK assassination would never have occurred and Dorothy Kilgallen would not have investigated and would not have died.

So I'm very passionate about this. What happened after the Warren Commission report came out? Everyone bought it. All the media believed it. CBS made a three-part series that is on YouTube. They called Cronkite, Dan Rather and Morley Safer. They did all these experiments. They do everything. the ICWA. The commission got it right. The House Select Committee on Assassinations met in '76. Nothing. There's really nothing there. Annoy provoke the Warren Commission. But, I repeat, they did not have all the evidence. And then the church report, Frank Church, a senator, had a report that they did and it talked about the Warren Commission.

None of the dissident stuff is in any of that. Well. And guess who else appears in any of those documents? Dorothy Kilgallen was never invited to appear before the commission, although, as you'll see in a minute, she was the lone wolf crying. Is there no Oswald alone? No Oswald alone. It's something more. She was not on the House Select Committee on Assassinations and was not in the church report. So all of that information never made it to the public regarding what these things that we found here recently are. But there was Dorothy Kilgallen in Dallas. You have to know that she was a very good friend of JFK.

He came to her house for parties. He played charades with her when he was a senator. She was a very close friend of his. At one point, he invited her to the White House with her young son, Kerry, and made a fuss over some papers and letters Kerry brought from school. She is the son of Dorothy, Kerry, Dorothy, Son Kerry. And so there was a very close relationship there. And so, when she watched him get murdered and then Ruby shot Oswald, and as I've shown in my books, Oswald's testimony before the Warren Commission was false. But she found out that he would be there when they were going to move Oswald, all of that.

So Dorothy knew all that. And what did she do? She went to Dallas. She interviewed Jeff Curry, the Dallas police chief, who said the first shots came from the overpass, not the Book Depository. She was in Dealey Plaza. She was doing all that to investigate. She was at Ruby's trial. I always tell my skeptics: Hey, were you in Dallas? You were there? No, of course they weren't. I was not there. Dorotea was there. We have the photograph. She was there with Melvin Belli, the video of that is on the website, the Dorothy Kilgallen story. Borgu. There's a lot of stuff up there if you want to take a look.

She went to Ruby's trial, front row. She listened to all the testimonies. She interviewed Jack Ruby, the only one to do so at the trial. Of 400 reporters. Now how did he get that one? It's not easy to do in books, and especially in the fight for justice. But also collateral damage. And the journalist hits too much, basically. What was there? She was there. Jack Ruby told his co-counsel, Joe Tannehill, that at the Carousel Club they watched What's My Line every Sunday night, as millions of people did, and that they had respect for him and that somehow they had a friend in common that he was an opera presenter.

Singer in San Francisco. So during lunchtime, Tannehill said, Jack wants to talk to you. And she talked to him for about 8 minutes. And then there was also another small rapid. And so, whatever he told her, and what we'll talk about, we don't know exactly and I'll mention why, but she was at work and the first time, a few days after the murder, her column, the Oswald. The file should not be closed. Justice is a big rug when when it unfolds, many other people fight. He reported on Ruby's friendships with the Dallas police. She reports that she was the only one who went against the grain of this Oswald situation alone, putting herself in danger, obviously, from J.

Edgar Hoover, LBJ, all these people who want to close the door on everything that's happening. So none of that information appeared in the newspapers other than what Dorothy wrote. She was not in the Warren Commission report. She wasn't in the other investigations or anything like that. But what Dorothy discovered was basically this: you have to look at why. As a former criminal defense attorney who handled primarily murder cases, I always looked for motive when I did my network analysis of O.J.'s legal analysis. and the case of Mike Tyson and Kobe Bryant. I always look at the reason.

And that's what Dorothy did. She was very intelligent. She investigated the case of Dr. Sam Shepard, from which she became a fugitive, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case. She was, according to the New York Post, the most powerful female voice in the United States, distributed in 200 newspapers across the country. One million people listened to the radio program. She was a woman of action and a woman trusted by her colleagues and with the best sources.So what did he do after interviewing Ruby? Now, George is right. For example, let's back up a minute. We don't really know anything about the CIA because the Warren Commission never investigated.

We don't really know much about the Cubans who obviously could have turned against JFK because of the problem with the attack on the invasion of Cuba, with all those people killed. There, all the soldiers we don't know. LBJ is being investigated for his connections to the oil industry and other skeletons in his closet because he was never investigated. We don't know about the Kennedys because Katzenbach said, no, no, no, we're not going to talk about how they rigged the '60 election or anything like that. We don't know anything about that. All we know is that Dorothy Kilgallen, the first place she went after talking to Ruby was New Orleans.

And that's where Carlos Marcello Mafia don was, whom Bobby Kennedy had deported within weeks of JFK's death. Excuse me. He was deported a few days or weeks after JFK's inauguration. Doble was a betrayal because Joe Kennedy had promised those gangsters that he would leave them alone if they helped them win the elections. Instead, Marcello was deported by Bobby Kennedy. So when 1963 rolls around, this is what Dorothy thought. Hear. A reason. Let's see who has the biggest motive to kill JFK. Well, I'd like to go ahead and kill Robert Kennedy so he doesn't cause me any problems.

But I'm going to go ahead and I think I'm going to kill JFK, I'm going to have him killed. So Bobby Kennedy will be helpless and he will never come for me. And that's exactly what happened. He never did. So in her opinion, Dorothy, when we get to the fall of 1965, what does she know? She knows about Ruby, you know, she obviously she was involved in and shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. And she doesn't believe, from what he told her, that it was his idea that she was ordered to do it. She knows about the corruption at the Warren Commission.

She knows about the Warren Commission. Ruby's testimony does not match her testimony at trial. She knows all this kind of stuff that was going on and she's put herself in danger, right? And she arrives in November. She visits New Orleans and confirms that she can connect Oswald, Marcello and Ruby. And she comes back and she's a charlatan. And she tells everyone: I'm going to open the case wide open. If the wrong people knew what I know about the murder, would it cost me my life? I bought a gun. I fear for my life and my family.

And on November 8, 1965, she was found in a bedroom in which she never slept. In her house in her Manhattan, with her eyelashes, makeup, and her hairpiece. Y. And she's dead. No investigation of any kind. The cause of death was reportedly a drug overdose. Undetermined circumstances. No investigation. No investigation into Marilyn's death. There is no investigation into JFK's death. None of them got the justice they deserved. But tonight we'll talk about the whole situation with JFK. He deserved better, right? He deserved it. He and his family deserved to know better what really happened when he was murdered in Dallas in 1963.

And that didn't happen. And it's unfortunate because much of this was covered up by the government. You know, if we learn anything from this, its relevance is to ask questions. Don't take all that nonsense on the internet at face value. Don't do some of these extreme news outlets. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Ask questions. You know, with young people, I tell them all the time to ask questions because back then they didn't ask enough questions. They believed the entire Warren Commission verdict: hook, line and sinker. And it was obvious that there could have been other problems there, you know, but it was all covered up, which is extremely disappointing and frustrating.

And it seems like, after all these years, there's still information that they're not releasing and they're saying, well, we have to delay this a little bit longer because it may affect the lives of people who are still alive. But you know, it's been 60 years. Well, at what point do you think the government should just give away all the information it has? Well, it's disturbing. And I think that's why people have so many problems with the government today. The government cover-up, the fake news, everything that comes to light. We don't have a reporter. How many emails have I received from around the world saying they wish we had an upright reporter like Dorothy Kilgallen today?

There aren't any out there. I just reprimanded a USA Today journalist who wrote an article saying that I felt like he didn't really do any research. And he was in one of those moods of mine while she was writing it. So I wrote back and said, Jeff, you're not Dorothy Kilgallen because they don't do research anymore. They look for the sensational headline and then come up with facts that might fit it. Dorothy didn't do that. She went out and found the facts and then she used the headlines or whatever that way. That's why she was so, so respected.

You know, just for those of you who are in the online audience, we're showing this series of photographs here, which are from the life of John Kennedy, from Dorothy Kilgallen, from the life of Marilyn. Just to give you pictures of what they were like. So. Yes. And just one more thing. Very, very critical of the media back then, Dorothy had the story. She was there. She was very respected. But I can't find any accounts of her, of her, you know, of her columns or anything like that of her. We have analyzed it very carefully. They just appeared in the New York Journal, American, because this is what happens.

And I'll tell you one thing, in all the books written since JFK's assassination, in none of them do we find Dorothy Kilgallen's name. What they do is leave her out of it and, frankly, leave me out of it because we're going against the grain. If you include my research, especially Dorothy's, although research and all, it goes completely against Oswald. Gerald Posner, Vincent Bugliosi, all these, all these, these, these authors and everything. I even talked to Vincent DiLeo, saw Manson's former prosecutor about Dorothy Kilgallen before he wrote his book Reclaims History. And I told him about Dorothy's research and I knew him and he said, Mark, my God, this makes a big difference.

I'm going to include that in my book. Do you think she was there? No, unfortunately, what you can do is skip that kind of thing and just do another quick thing. So it's like a disagreement with the Warren Commission. Absolutely. It is safe. That's true. You can just skip it. That's true. And some of my followers tell me, for example, okay, there's a big JFK conference in Pittsburgh this month and another one in Dallas. And I assume you know the one in Memphis. You're going to be there, right? Aren't you going to talk there? They don't invite me.

Now. There could be many reasons why they don't, but they don't want to hear about me and they don't want to hear about Dorothy Kilgallen because she disrupts everything they're trying to do because it's still them. We're still biting into that whole thing about Oswald alone and then crazy stuff and conspiracy theories and everything else like that. I recently received one that I think was as crazy as it gets and then I'll share it with you tonight. Jackie Kennedy shot JFK and did so on the White House lawn with a gun given to him by the Secret Service.

And then after she shot him, he threw the gun into the bushes and they came and picked up JFK's body. And there has been a similarity. There was a similar look after that which combed the earth. That's how strange it gets. Now, George, you don't believe that, do you? I know. It reminds me of something I concluded a long time ago. There is no myth so irrational that no one believes it. It's probably true. And there is no truth so obvious that everyone accepts it. That seems to be the way humanity is going. You know, be serious again.

Just look at those two little children, John-John and Caroline. Well? And there is a great book written by Caroline about her father. And, you know, a lot of the stories of them together were the photograph that they sent me recently, almost with tears in their eyes. JFK leaves the White House carrying John John's teddy bear. And I mean, he loves those kids. Do you remember the photo of JFK, of John-John under the president's desk? I mean, he lost all that at a young age. And Jackie lost everything and everything. But it's sad to think about because it should never have happened.

MORRIS Wolf told me, by the way, that they knew Jack Kennedy would be in trouble if he went to Dallas and they argued as much as they could about having a limousine with a top. And then he told me that his brother, who had lived in Dallas for 40 years, told him, no, he can't come here. Someone is going to kill him. And obviously that's what happened. So the warnings were there and unfortunately no one listened at all. Know. So why don't we talk a little more about John Kennedy, it being his

60th

birthday? As I said at the beginning, you've written about the difficulties of the Kennedy family and, you know, the bad habits they had and things like that.

But why don't you talk briefly about the brothers, the Cuban missile crisis, and how they depended on each other? And although there is evidence that the book that Bobby wrote is not an accurate representation of what happened, the general arc is that the two Kennedys, knowing the history, did not want to let this get into a nuclear situation. So why don't you talk a little about that? Because I think they may be at their best in foreign policy. Well, the bright moments for them are two. One of them is civil rights, without a doubt. Maurice Wolff told me about that.

Bobby Kennedy was the one who was going to change the world. He wasn't going to allow it. What was happening was that many African Americans and blacks were crossing states and then entering a state and getting arrested. They couldn't stay at Howard Johnson's, they couldn't stay in hotels, they couldn't eat in restaurants, all of this. And he was fiercely determined. And one time he mentioned to me that Bobby Kennedy was pounding his fist on the desk about these people being arrested and being escorted by water, as you know, and the dogs and the horses and all that and how strongly he believed in.

They had to do something. And Maurice was right in the middle of it. And there would never have been a Civil Rights Act of 1964 if it hadn't been for Bobby Kennedy. So I'm a big opponent of his in many ways, especially in terms of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe. But that's a badge of honor for him. Sure. And JFK backed him up on that. There was no rivalry about it. There was no jealousy there at all. And they were determined to do something about civil rights. And that's how they achieved it. And then came his best moment, I think, with the Cuban missile crisis.

And you have to remember what was happening there. I read an interesting biography. I'm writing a biography of Lincoln right now, which is very, very interesting. And I see in him a lot of traits that I saw in JFK, you know, passion is the main one, passion. If they believed in something and, you know, they were surely going to follow through with it. But I read a biography of Cuba, basically what it was, and it talks about Cuba and it goes back to which is very disturbing, of course, with the whole slavery situation and the United States and a lot of businessmen here making millions. and millions of dollars for it.

But Cuba finally got to a point where it was independent and seemed to be doing well and so on. And then, of course, Fidel Castro came in and then they got involved with the Russians. And what was going to happen, they felt that they felt isolated. They felt like the United States was going to take over and all that. And then they made an agreement with the Russians and all that. And we discovered there that the government did not find out that they had had missiles there that could reach American cities. So Morris, you know, talk a little bit about that.

But the whole situation was that some action had to be taken. And there were those hawks who believed and really tried to convince John F. Kennedy that the best thing to do was invade Cuba, go in there and get them out. Alright. And he listened and listened. And then he and Bobby and Bobby hit their stride because he used a back channel to communicate with one of the officials in Cuba. And they basically said and made it clear that they were going to stop those ships from going to Cuba. And there was no, you know, there was no flexibility in that.

And then John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy put our country at risk by stopping those ships, because what could have happened, obviously, because Khrushchev was screaming and yelling, you can't do that and we're going to invade the United States. . But, in my opinion, they went ahead and did it and saved us. And I think it is correct to say about a nuclear war at that time. Then you have to think about it. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in '68, just five years after his brother, he had many flaws, but he certainly shouldn't have had them. Some people ask if there is a connection between that death and JFK and I have said many times that I think so, I think Marcello in New Orleans said to himself, wait a minute.

Bobby Kennedy knows it. And by the way, RFK is going around the country talking about the fact that he told her that the CIA was involved in JFK's death, which is not true. J. Bobby Kennedy told all his advisors and government officials and everything about what the guy from New Orleans was. And I thought they'd get someone to take one of us, but not me and all that. He's just making up the story by doing that. But Marcello would have thought with common sense. Hear. Bobby Kennedy knows it. I killed his brother. He is going to be president.

USA. What's the first thing he's going to do?do? Are you coming after me? So I've been able to make some connections between Sirhan Sirhan and Marcello, but until now I've never been able to make enough connections to put them in a book. Maybe someone will see this presentation and come back to me with that connection. But I don't speculate. But I don't speculate. But it's just sad. It's just sad that the two Kennedys died the way they did. Now, one last comment on the Cuban missile crisis. They were also realistic. The agreement they made to allow Khrushchev to have some presence in Russia was that they would remove the missiles from Turkey, which we had already placed there.

And they already know it, and that was part of the deal behind the scenes, which of course, they're not going to say out loud. But that was effective in reaching that conclusion. So it's time to put an end to this. But I thought we'd give the last word to our online audience by watching the live stream. There are two comments. One is from a mr. Allen. He said Dorothy Kilgallen is a hero. And there's another comment from a man named Vic Kaser, and he suggested that the Warren Report would be a great doorstop. And don't throw it at anyone's foot.

Yes, sorry, George. No problem. So I think the bottom line here, after all these years of working on it, is that we have information that we know is accurate. We know that they should have at least taken this dissent very seriously. And they investigated it, which they didn't do for some reason, you know, they did. And there's this reporter, Dorothy Kilgallen, who was looking for the information, had a relatively reasonable idea of ​​what probably happened but she was murdered before she could bring it to light. Well, and that's the proof. Yes, Dorothy was right. That? They killed her, you know, they silenced her.

And the end of history. I mean, that's basically, if you think about it, you know, they couldn't let her write that book for Random House. She was writing about a book that says it all. Because Hoover would have been accused of covering up the murder. And in my opinion, although George is right, we can't know for sure. But Marcello would have been accused of orchestrating JFK's death. That book couldn't come out, right? Yes. No, but we can talk about it now. 60 years later. Finally. If we can. Y. And anyone who has other information in his family contact, Mark, you know, other families have had information passed on to them and he will look into it.

So thank you, because I don't think we're done yet. After seven years in '66. Well, anyway, thank you very, very much for joining us again. And so ends another event at the Commonwealth Club and its 121st year of illustrated debate. Thank you so much for coming and I hope you got more information if you watch this online or on YouTube. Thanks again for watching. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank