Why People Think The Government Killed JFK

(Dramatic music begins) - The President's car now turns onto Elm Street in a parade of open limousines. (gunshots) - There's a cover-up about to happen here. - This is a situation and I read: "Kennedy gets shot in the head." -The assassination of a president and then a fight by the United States

government

to hide information from his

people

. - A lot of information was hidden from the American public. - How many, how many, how many shots were fired? - Three. -The question of who shot JFK and why he has captivated America since that horrible day 60 years ago.

But over time, it became clear that the FBI and CIA kept information hidden, not only from the public, but also from the commission charged with investigating the murder. This has fueled understandable doubt in the official narrative, including, incidentally, Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who took JFK's place. Congress even came out in the '80s saying this was probably a conspiracy, and the public went crazy over this. They came up with hundreds of suspects who might have been involved in the murder. Theories like this thrive when

government

authorities are not transparent with their

people

. So let me show you how this happened.

Let me explain the official story and why that story has been hit by a wave of doubt over the decades and explain that unlike many conspiracy theories, doubting the official story here is not as crazy as you might

think

. (tense dramatic music) - This was a turning point in American history. Suddenly people decided, "I'm not sure they're telling us the truth." - JFK is a really symbolic character who lived during a very, very important time in American history, and the story really dives into the context of what it was like to be in America in the '60s.

I'm really excited to dive in and show them all the things. I need to thank the sponsor of today's video. Sponsors allow us to do these super deep dives that take months to do with lots of different people, so thank you, BetterHelp, for sponsoring the video. I am a true believer in therapy. BetterHelp makes therapy more accessible for people using technology. It's a platform where you sign up, fill out information about yourself, what you're struggling with, what you want to achieve, and then it connects you with someone in their network. It's this giant network of tens of thousands of licensed therapists that you can then connect with one of those therapists in as little as 48 hours.

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It's Betterhelp.com/johnnyharris. When you click the link, you help support the channel, but you also get 10% off your first month of BetterHelp. So you can try it at a discount, see if it works for you, and if not, you can cancel at any time. Thank you, BetterHelp, for sponsoring today's video. Let's dive back into this fascinating story of what happened to JFK. (typewriter keyboard) (tense, suspenseful music) People loved John Kennedy. He was a handsome boy who was always hanging out with his beautiful family and seemed to instill confidence in people. Kennedy parlayed this positive perception into the ranks of American politics until he became the 35th president.

This was in the early 1960s, when the United States was going through a gigantic time of transition. - Oh, this is a revolution, of course, that is sweeping our country now. - The United States was the global superpower and was trapped in a Cold War with another empire a world away. Then JFK becomes president and discovers that his military and intelligence leaders are causing a lot of problems around the world. They had become very comfortable with dangerous secrets. They were financing wars, overthrowing governments in distant countries, assassinating leaders who threatened American interests, and doing most of this completely secret.

By the way, if you want to know more about those CIA shenanigans, watch the video where we map all the coups in the United States. Anyway, JFK walks in and sees this as "too much." He wants to rein in these military leaders and spies from what he considers an abuse of American power. He ended up firing and demoting a group of these leaders, many of these military and intelligence guys who were planning and executing covert operations around the world, and he continued to pursue his ideal of world peace. He chose diplomacy over violence. When nuclear-armed missiles were found in Cuba, he slowed the push toward a large-scale presence in Vietnam and shut down several of these covert operations that were being planned by the leaders around him.

This caused great tension between JFK and US military and intelligence leaders. All this context is important when we remember that day in November 1963. - Friday morning, 11:37, the president's plane lands at the Dallas airport. (typewriter keyboard) (tense, suspenseful music) - President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson arrived in Dallas for a speech the president was going to give. He got into this open-top limousine with his wife, Jackie, and Texas Governor John Connally, along with his wife, Nellie. They walked through these streets, downtown Dallas was filled with cheering spectators, and then gunshots were heard. (gunshots) - Kennedy was apparently shot in the head.

He had blood on his head. - The shots hit the President in the neck and head, also wounding Governor Connally. The president was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. -And very often you will find a hidden zipper on his arm. - Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. You'll forgive the fact that I'm out of breath, but President Kennedy and Governor John Connally have been shot to death in downtown Dallas. The president rushed to Parkland Hospital. (tense, suspenseful music) (tense, suspenseful music) (typewriter keyboard) - Within hours of the murder, the prime suspect became this 24-year-old former Marine, a self-proclaimed communist who had renounced his American citizenship and had moved to the Soviet Union, where he then became disenchanted with life in Russia and returned to the U.S.

Eventually, he ended up on the sixth floor of this building in Dallas where he worked and where he was that November morning where he pointed a rifle and fired. President. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald. And after these shots rang out, he fled. As he fled, he shot and

killed

a Dallas police officer before hiding in a movie theater and eventually being arrested around 2:15 p.m. m. of that day. - I didn't shoot anyone, no, sir. - There was going to be a trial and Oswald planned to plead not guilty, claiming that everything was actually a setup. - I'm just a scapegoat. - Patsy, which is an old term for the scapegoat, the one who was set up.

That same day, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was rushed to Air Force One and sworn in as the new president of the United States before taking off and returning to Washington. At the same time, the FBI, our country's premier investigative agency, descends on Dallas. And very quickly, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who is a big part of the story, comes to a conclusion about what happened. This was before any investigation had actually been launched. And Hoover decides that Oswald was absolutely the one who did it. He was a communist sympathizer, a frustrated misfit and, most importantly, he acted alone.

There was no one else. Here is a phone call between Hoover and the new president, LBJ. - There is no doubt that he is the man now. Fingerprints and things we have. - I would like to have legal representation, but you police officers have not allowed me to have it. - But fortunately we have a justice system and we will know what the facts really say. Oswald was to be tried where the evidence could be thoroughly examined, where the country could see for itself who really shot its president and bring closure to this horrible event, where whoever did it could be brought to justice.

But that never happened. Two days after the assassination, as Oswald was being transported from police headquarters to the county jail, a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby jumped in front of the crowd of police officers and reporters and shot Oswald. (gunshots) He was rushed to the hospital where he died shortly after, the same hospital where President Kennedy had died just 48 hours earlier. - Lee Oswald was shot. -I

think

he got what he deserved from him, if he was the one who did it. - It is difficult to say how long it will be until what happened is fully understood. - With Oswald dead, there could be no trial, no true sense of justice.

This left government investigators, primarily the FBI, with the opportunity to really own the narrative of what happened. The next day, the Deputy Attorney General sends a memo to the White House stressing that the public must be satisfied with this explanation that Oswald acted alone. He had no accomplices who were still at large. This had to be the story and I'll explain why in a second. This memo also included some wisdom and a sort of foreshadowing of what would happen in the decades to come, where the memo urges the White House to release as much information as possible to the public to avoid public speculation.

Just remember that advice: "Disclose information to avoid public speculation." It's kind of the most important part of the story. We have these recently released phone recordings between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the new president, LBJ, and we see in this phone call that the FBI didn't really want a full investigation. - I think it would be very, very bad if there were a series of investigations. - It would be a three-ring circus. - Well, the only way to stop them is probably to appoint someone high level to evaluate their report. I can select outside the government and I could tell the House and Senate not to move forward with the investigation. -Yes.-LBJ creates this group called the Warren Commission, and as you can see in these phone calls, he was asking the director of the FBI who should be on the Commission. -What do you think of Allen Dulles? -I think he would be a good man. - Wait, did you catch that?

Allen Dulles was the former director of the CIA. He's one of the guys JFK fired after trying to overthrow the Cuban government. And now he is about to be named to the committee investigating the Kennedy assassination. This did nothing to inspire confidence in the Commission. - The new president appointed a commission of seven prominent Americans to investigate the whole matter. - The Special Commission will have before it all the evidence discovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and all the information available in any agencies of the Federal Government. - The Warren Commission was given only 10 months to investigate this situation using evidence largely provided to them by the FBI.

They produced this report, which essentially confirms the conclusion that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had reached in the hours and days after the assassination, that the shots were fired on November 22 that

killed

the president and wounded the governor. . They were fired by some guy, Lee Harvey Oswald. The report highlights that he acted alone. They say it very definitely. Neither he nor the person who killed him two days later, Jack Ruby, were part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign. All shots came only from the sixth floor of this building and, more importantly, only three shots were fired.

Three bullets. - How many, how many, how many shots were fired? - Three. - Did any of them shoot me? - No. - All three to the President? - All three to the President, and we have them. - The report says that the first bullet probably missed the car, but that the second one did something very interesting. First it hit the president in the back and then it came out of his chest. Then it entered the governor's back, passed through his rib, and then exited through his chest, but he was not done yet. He then entered his wrist, breaking the wrist bone, and then exited the wrist and partially entered the governor's leg.

Well, it's ok. It's quite a trip for a single bullet. Oh, and the bullet in question, which apparently caused seven wounds, supposedly looked like this, which some ballistics experts say seems too flawless for a bullet that supposedly just passed through two human bodies. And then, of course, the third bullet, according to the Warren Commission, was the one that fatally shot the president. This was the explanation that the Warren Commission gave to explain all the injuries found on the victims. All this damage had to be done withonly three bullets, and why only three bullets? Ask J. Edgar Hoover again right after the assassination. - On that floor we found the three empty shell casings that had been fired. - They only found three shell casings on that sixth floor.

So if all this damage was done with more than three bullets, that would mean there had to be more than one shooter. A conspiracy. But there can be no conspiracy. Hoover had adopted this line of thinking right after the assassination, this assumption that it was just one man, and that line of thinking lived on in the Warren Commission, a commission that Hoover himself helped the president put together. In the end, the Commission used a large amount of carefully selected evidence provided to them by the FBI that supported their already drawn conclusions. And in the process, they diverted any focus from exploring all possibilities, including the possibility of a conspiracy.

The report focuses almost entirely on one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the three bullets shot at him. -Who killed John F. Kennedy? The Commission responds unequivocally: "Lee Harvey Oswald." Was Oswald a member of a conspiracy? The Commission responds: "he acted alone." -They ignored witnesses who contradicted his stories. They ignored or modified reports signed by the surgeons and doctors who worked on President Kennedy immediately after his arrival at the hospital that said the wounds to the President's neck and chest area appeared to have come from the front, i.e., not from this building that was behind the president.

In other words, the FBI and the Warren Commission ignored the advice in that memo admonishing the government to reveal all the facts. In my opinion, this was the biggest mistake and the root of all conspiracy theories that exist today. The question I asked myself in all of this is, why? Why not do a proper investigation that explores the possibility that this was done by a group of conspirators rather than a single individual? For me, the answer to this question has a lot to do with the greatest fears facing the American government and people in the early 1960s. (tense, suspenseful music) (typewriter keyboard) First, we must remember that the United States of the 1960s was right in the heart of the Cold War, a time of constant vigilance for fear of a nuclear apocalypse , of extreme tension between these two superpowers.

Yes this murder was seen as an attempt to overthrow the government. Or worse yet, if it had been organized by the Soviet Union or its communist regime in Cuba, it would create a sense of panic among the American public. It would be a very different situation than a 24-year-old communist sympathizer acting alone. An alleged conspiracy would also create pressure from the American public to fight back, which could lead to escalation with another nuclear-armed nation. Oh, and the CIA also had an incentive to prevent an investigation from going too far. At that time, they were secretly carrying out all these operations to assassinate the leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro.

This was a big deal and was a big secret at the time. Any deep investigation into a possible conspiracy with Cuba could reveal that the CIA is trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, which would not be good for the CIA. So one way to read all of this, the memos, the rushed conclusion, the emphasis on Oswald acting alone, the need for only three bullets, you can see this as a group of government officials struggling to maintain public calm. US. to ensure that chaos does not break out while reducing the possibility of geopolitical escalation with the Soviet Union.

This can be seen in some of these phone calls where the new president is deeply concerned about keeping the American people united around a simplified narrative of what happened. He worries that if alternative theories come to light, they could threaten our entire system. So his tactic to do this was to hijack the narrative to suppress and influence the investigation and make it very simple, Oswald did that. That's all. But here's the problem. Eventually, people will do the math and realize that the government has been hiding the full picture from them, and that's exactly what will happen next. (tense, suspenseful music) (typewriter keyboard) Then the Warren Commission presents its report with the official story of what happened, but shortly after doing so, the members of the Warren Commission themselves come out and say as if They didn't actually believe the story. story just released by the Warren Commission, especially when it comes to the key claim that one bullet was responsible for causing seven wounds. - I couldn't convince myself that the same bullet hit them both. - Do you mean that you yourself were not convinced of the single bullet theory? - No, I wasn't convinced. - Governor Connally, the one sitting across from JFK and the one supposedly shot by that single bullet, disagreed with the story. - I understand that in the minds of the experts there are doubts about whether or not both of us could have been hit by the same bullet.

I just don't believe that. - Not even the new president, LBJ, was totally convinced. I mean, he was kind of secretive about it, but he finally came out and told a journalist from the Atlantic that he thought this was a conspiracy, that this was Cuba retaliating against the US for all these attempts by the CIA to assassinate its leader. This was not good for the Warren Commission and its history. Then, 12 years after the assassination, this complete, uncut version of a filmstrip showing the JFK assassination finally airs on national television. - It is the film shot by the Dallas dress manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder, and it is the execution of President Kennedy. - This was the first time Americans could see solid visual evidence of this event, but why hadn't it been published before?

For some, this film contradicted the official narrative of the Warren Commission and unleashed this new demand for real answers from a government that continued to behave as if it were hiding something. All of this coincides with a moment in American history when Americans are losing faith in the federal government. You just see this huge plummet. All of the CIA's covert operations are starting to come to light, the country is mired in this endless war in Vietnam, the president's people have just been found spying on his political opponents in a hotel in D.C. That is, the government has not earned our trust in At this point, people say, "It wouldn't be too difficult to say that the government was also behind the JFK assassination." This was compounded by the suspicious assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. - Dr.

Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement, was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. - All this was too much and people wanted answers. Then, in a shining moment of redemption for our democracy, Congress responded by forming a committee that reopened the investigations into these two assassinations, JFK and MLK. This committee did a real investigation. In fact, they were serious about it and confirmed what many Americans were already feeling, which is that the Warren Commission investigation did not sufficiently examine the possibilities of a conspiracy. They say it point blank. They were too fixated on their assumptions that it had to be this lone gunman who did it and that his conclusions were too definitive, and then they specifically called out the FBI and CIA for withholding information from the investigation.

One FBI agent even testified that his superiors ordered him to destroy evidence. In this case, a letter Oswald had written to the FBI. -And he handed it to me and said: "Oswald is already dead. There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this." - Why did the FBI ask its agents to destroy evidence? The committee concluded that there was a "high probability that it was two gunmen who shot JFK and that it was likely a conspiracy." That's what it says. But they stopped short of trying to determine who the other gunman was or who had organized the conspiracy.

And then they again make the recommendation that all information on this topic be made public. - Isn't it time that the American people at least knew what happened at 12:30 pm in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963? - Quick caveat, the committee's conclusion that the murder was probably a conspiracy was based largely on one piece of evidence, which was the sound recording from that day where gunshots can be heard and more than three are heard, and in In some ways it is inferred that there were multiple shooters. This evidence was later questioned and somewhat discredited by the FBI, but also by a different research center that basically said, "This sound recording wasn't even gunshots.

It wasn't even recorded during the time of the murder." But to me, the whole conspiracy thing wasn't really the most important part of this committee's report. The most important part was that they confirmed that the Warren Commission had been cherry-picking evidence and hiding things from the American people. After the Congressional Committee confirmed to the American people that the FBI and CIA had been hiding evidence, conspiracy theories emerged once again, culminating in this early '90s film that paints an alternative picture of what could happen. have happened here, a shadowy government conspiracy to kill the president, or at least a conspiracy to cover up the true story. - Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the mafia, keeps them guessing like some kind of parlor game, prevents them from asking the most important question: why?

Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up? - The movie was largely a guess, based on some elements of truth, and some might argue that it was irresponsibly misleading to show the American public something like, "Hey, the government killed the president." But hey, in a world where the government is not clear and direct with the American people, this movie felt like a response. Maybe the government was hiding the truth, maybe the government did, or maybe they are just covering up something. We don't know because they haven't published information. This was a popular movie and people latched onto the theories presented in it. -The idea that there was more than one group of shooters as physically presented in this film is very compelling. - Public pressure became so intense that Congress finally decided to do what it should have done in the '60s, which is force all of these agencies to release all the information.

So in 1992, Congress passes this law that would lay the groundwork for the release of all documents related to the murder by October 2017. That was the deadline. They assembled a committee and gave them several years to review all the documents, re-examine the official account, and prepare these documents for release to the public. In fact, we spoke with the president of that committee. -President Clinton nominated me to chair the Assassination Records Review Board. - In the process of reviewing all this documentation, this review board found more inconsistencies and discrepancies and cases of possible cover-up, such as the autopsy.

There's a whole video I could make about the autopsy and the missing brain and all this, but the crux of the matter is what the doctors and surgeons saw moments after the president was shot. They recorded and wrote, but what the official autopsy record actually looked like when it was published was something very different. The way the wounds were described, where they were, what the brain looked like, all of that had been changed or modified. The photos themselves had potentially been changed, and then the brain itself literally disappeared. It's like he's missing. Anyway, that's a whole rabbit hole you can go down if you want.

The release of all these records also revealed that the CIA and FBI had been monitoring Oswald's whereabouts, which maybe makes sense because he was like a Soviet sympathizer, but why didn't we know that before? We found out that the Secret Service had destroyed documents, the original caravan route sheets they had, the surveillance tapes from that day. They had been destroyed. - Now we found those documents in the hands of another agency, so in the end there was no damage. - Judge Tunheim said that yes, they obtained many documents, but that there were still many things missing.

There was a guy at the CIA who took control of the investigation a couple of weeks after the assassination, and all records of him are simply missing. - Now, did he destroy them all? Maybe, I do not know. There's no real record of that, so you still have that previously destroyed issue. - In total, they eventually released 5 million documents as of 2017, basically everything except a few thousand documents that the CIA still refuses to release. Because? Guys, come on. You can find this entire trove of JFK documents on the National Archives website. We will put a link in the description.

Okay, but here's the craziest part ofAll this. Even after 5 million documents were released to the American public, to a public that was hungry for a similar conspiracy, there is still no solid evidence in all of this that points to a conspiracy, that points to anyone other than Lee. Harvey Oswald as the person who assassinated the President by himself, acting on his behalf. Now, the evidence may exist somewhere, but it's been destroyed or whatever. The thing is, the government could have released these five million documents in the '60s. They could have done this when people wanted it, when they should have done it, and it wouldn't have changed their official story and it would have satiated an American public that was skeptical of his government.

Although at this point I think it's too late. The sense that the government was hiding something has sunk deep into the American psyche. We all thought, "The JFK assassination, yeah, there was something up there." I'm not really sure that they will ever regain our trust in this case because of how much hidden information there was over all these decades. So, on the Internet, everywhere, from people who are actually quite credible, alternative explanations abound. Maybe it was LBJ who planned it so he could be president. Or what I think is perhaps the most plausible theory, which is that some rebel faction of the CIA wanted to eliminate JFK because JFK was against what the CIA was up to.

He was shutting down his covert operations. And then there is, of course, the idea that Cuba did it. I mean, that's what LBJ, the president after JFK, thought. He said: "It was probably Cuba because we have been trying to assassinate their leader." The point is that because of the information vacuum left by the CIA and FBI hiding evidence from the American people, people began to look at the evidence they did have and pick up on any evidence. they could find for conspiracy. They began connecting the dots of witnesses who encountered mysterious or suspicious deaths. Many theorists will notice this mysterious man holding an umbrella in this video on a sunny day, perhaps giving the signal to a second shooter?

It's all very tempting, and some of it is actually very valid as a lead for further investigation, but despite a lot of really suspicious things, I haven't seen any solid evidence to prove an alternative story to what we've been told in the past. In the '60s, Lee Harvey Oswald was the guy who did it and went it alone. I think it's very possible that there could be some conspiracy. I don't think we'll ever know because we just don't have the evidence. One thing I do know, however, what we do know for certain is that the moment this investigation became an effort to suppress information and influence the facts to reach a conclusion, it laid the groundwork for the public turned this into a cesspool of speculation.

Once again, I keep coming back to that feeling that your government lied to me. It is very powerful. It stays with you. It creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories of all kinds to sprout. Because when you feel like your own democracy, your own leaders are lying to you, no matter the reason or justification, it makes you feel like you're alone, like no one has your back, and they're the ones who need to find the real truth. And for me, it's that space where the most enduring conspiracy theories find their place. (tense, suspenseful music) - Have you ever committed any act of violence in your life? - No. (tense, suspenseful music ends)