The JFK Assassination Part 1 with Mackenzie Joy Brennan

Where is Dana Scully when you need her? For the first installment of this two-part episode, legal correspondent Mackenzie Joy Brennan tells Sarah about what happened before, during, and after the moment that John F. Kennedy was shot in that Dallas motorcade, the lasting cultural images that have been burned into the public consciousness, and the story of the man who shot the man and the man who shot the man who shot the man. Plus, the conspiracy theory that walked so that the paranoias of today could run — and how we can orient ourselves in reality despite our strongly held beliefs. Digressions include Oregon Trail bison, jaundiced tans, and the triumph of 90s legal thrillers. More Mackenzie Joy Brennan:http://www.mkzjoybrennan.comEdited + produced by Miranda Zickler:http://www.linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonster Fact checking by Julie KliegmanMore You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sarah Marshall?

  This is what I'll do. After the grid goes down, I'll tell people what I remember from The Simpsons.

• 0:16Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we talk about the mother of all conspiracy theories, I would say, not clickbait. With me today is our Law Talking correspondent, Mackenzie Brennan. Mackenzie, hello.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hi, I, I think I agree. It's definitely like in the top 10 bracket of conspiracy theories. Should I, should I spill the beans such as they are?

• 0:42Sarah Marshall?

  You should, for the people who are, have a playlist going while painting a ceiling and haven't just looked at the title. What are we talking about?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Heck, yeah. In fact, I have a song to add to the playlist because I've been, I was a big Connor Oberst fan and "Sold Out" mentions this. It mentions a magic bullet and a grassy knoll. So that's your first clue.

• 1:02Sarah Marshall?

  There you go. And to quote my favorite reference, to get this out of the way, it is of course, the line in Veep in which Selena Meyer says, "I wouldn't be your Veep if there was a grassy knoll full of Jodie Foster fans at your inauguration." And Mackenzie, who are you? And tell us about your life until you joined us on this podcast.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I've always been super obsessed with the Kennedys in general. And I think in COVID went down, the various rabbit holes associated, but I've worked in various government entities as, you know, on both the legal side as a lawyer and on the policy side. I also do like true crime ethics commentary on the side. And now I'm knee deep in historical constitutional research about, you know, the foundations of our country. So all of these things intersect with this story. And I think that's part of why it appeals to so many people is that it covers so many fields of our lives and interests.

• 2:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. True crime ethics commentary is a very underrated side hustle, I would say.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's, um, I'm glad people are starting to talk more about it and the fact that like we can indulge in our human interests and also not compound harm while we're doing that.

• 2:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And trying to figure out the difference between the public's right to know and, you know, One's own desire to know,

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27Sarah Marshall?

  which can sometimes feel like each other, especially if we're not examining ourselves very hard.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  That's a great line to draw and way of putting it because obviously, we all have some lurid impulses. And this story is is unique, obviously, because it is American human interest, like, we all do deserve to know collectively.

• 2:46Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  But there are cases where that is not true. And we see through this case where like, we did get all the details as they came out because we were entitled, how much that can complicate the understanding of a narrative? And how messy that can get.

• 3:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and I can't wait to get into all that with you today. It's been an interesting road, you know, just in terms

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Boy, howdy.

• 3:09Sarah Marshall?

  So many of the the things that that intersect with this. And I wonder, kind of, in terms of your interests at this moment in time, like, why do you think we should be talking about this story?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  It's always relevant, right? Like, I think for those of us in our generation, too, there was a resurgence of the relevance of the conspiracy theory, specifically when the Oliver Stone JFK movie came out. And I believe that was 91, which was, you know, we'll get to it towards the end when we're talking about remaining, like, recriminations that come back about this and sources of misconceptions. But a lot of that movie was fake.

• 3:47Sarah Marshall?

  The movie that makes me ask the question, why does the District Attorney of Louisiana have the JFK assassination in his jurisdiction if it happened hundreds of miles away?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Right?

• 3:59Sarah Marshall?

  And also, how does Harry Connick Jr.'s dad fit into all this?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Oh, great point, which I remember learning in law school that he was an attorney in his own right, which was wild. But obviously, like, think of the fact that this comes up so frequently in cultural references, that there's the the grassy moe reference. That specifically is one of the conspiracies. It's not any of the established facts. We'll get to it. So I'd say, like, the you're wrong about of what I want to hit is misconceptions, conspiracies, public opinion at the time. And Since then, because obviously there have been other sources of conspiracies. And what's really interesting to me is what modern science has actually added to the forensic

• 4:44Speaker 01

  understanding and what we can look back on now that seemed maybe bizarre or unexplained that actually does track with the science, which

• 4:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  That's my favorite part. Yeah.

• 4:56Sarah Marshall?

  Because you can see forensic science kind of growing up with these conspiracy theories.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And think of where it was at the time.

• 5:03Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Really, really unevolved in comparison.

• 5:06Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, where was it? Do you have an example? I feel like the famous murders I can think of are like Sam Shepard, which inspired The Fugitive, which, you know, famously, I think, points to a time when you were kind of like, we found this guy near this thing that happened. So, you know.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  What do we do? Yeah, it's probably him. And I think that also probably in retrospect plays into people thinking that there is a conspiracy going on here because the forensics

• 5:31Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  in a very narrow sense were not advanced. And we'll get to why blunders really compounded some of those issues and kind of compounded it in a way that made conspiracies more likely than believing the facts.

• 5:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I can only imagine.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Because there were a lot of things, and I think this is more a part two addition, but like with the initial autopsy handling and people wanted certain things to be very formal and not in the hands of, say, the Dallas County Medical Examiner. And there are also choices about propriety of what hospital we went to because we're the Kennedys and he's the president. But that meant that they didn't get a forensic autopsy done. And that actually makes a huge difference in murder cases. So it's, I think there's kind of two prongs to it. There's the forensics weren't very advanced. And then there's the weird bureaucratic slash presidential blunders that were made in the very early days that we're still feeling the after effects of the holes that that left.

• 6:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  So to speak. Oops.

• 6:35Sarah Marshall?

  Well, hmm, you know what? It's a

• 6:38Speaker 01

  We'll come up.

• 6:39Sarah Marshall?

  Sometimes you're not even trying to make puns and yet they happen around you.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so um, so how about that? I thought like our first bit can be the context of the assassination and what JFK was doing in Dallas, what it meant for the country. And then moving to, obviously Lee Harvey Oswald himself was killed shortly thereafter. That probably contributed to a lot of, you know, eyes gazing askance at who's doing what. So what do you know about the assassination and what's the context that it lives in in your brain?

• 7:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I feel like I know the pop culture version, which is, you know, something that has come up on the show a lot, but just the fact that the pop culture universe, I would say of like roughly, you know, 1950 to 2000, let's say the age of mass media before the internet replaced TV is kind of the most viable form of communication. Where it was like one of the fairly finite list of pop culture phenomena that was referenced all the time, right? And then people understood visual references to it. And there's like, you know, what jumps to mind? And this is, you know, JFK inspired a boom in this as well, but that there's like an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa becomes a beauty queen.

• 7:58Sarah Marshall?

  And then because she has to step in to replace the winner and there's like a visual homage to the photo of LBJ being sworn in

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 8:08Sarah Marshall?

  On Air Force One or whatever plane it was in that episode of The Simpsons, you know? And so they just sort of, the outline of it in terms of like this big sort of cartoon that it became, I think it feels like maybe the way we talk about nine 11 now where there's this like big layer of like gallows humor around it to protect ourselves from like. The abject horror of it, if you think about it too hard. And yeah, so I mean, the pop culture version, right? To me is that you have the Kennedys in Dallas. It's 1963. Everything's groovy. Well, it's not groovy yet. It's um, things might be a go-go by then, though.

• 8:47Sarah Marshall?

  And that he's this like young, youthful, tan, healthy president, actually very sickly.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  So funny. Yeah.

• 8:55Sarah Marshall?

  But a very tan, sickly person, which still throws people off. If you're chronically yellow, just get a tan, I guess.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Well, I've actually read about that because the, one of the reasons that I love this, it became a hyper fixation, obviously, but he was jaundiced. That some of the, the conditions that he had actually made him have a yellow hue to his skin. But in especially like the proto-color imagery that we had at the time, it made him look very tan and healthy, but like it was exactly the opposite.

• 9:28Sarah Marshall?

  Incredible. But like lack of forensics, lack of like high-res, like today people will be like, the president is looking jaundiced or something.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 9:37Sarah Marshall?

  But also there'd be a lot of conspiracy theories about how he's a Catholic, just like then.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Disgusting.

• 9:43Sarah Marshall?

  So that's something.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:45Sarah Marshall?

  And you know, the so many movies and shows and just random things I've seen throughout my life are like flooding my brain right now because there's

• 9:52Speaker 01

  It's everywhere.

• 9:52Sarah Marshall?

  The history of it and there's, yeah, and there's a thing about your parents talking about it if they're kind of boomer age or around there, which certainly my mom remembered it very closely.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what was her story? What was her memory of it?

• 10:03Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yes, I mean, nothing particularly unusual and probably like the same story. I have about nine 11, which is I went to school like usual. And then the teachers told us something terrible had happened. Actually, nine 11 on the West Coast, you woke up to it.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  I woke up to it. Yeah.

• 10:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But, um, but where it's a normal day and then it's not. And you're just kind of like a kid who's not directly affected by it at all, but just who's like, I think maybe it's like, uh, these things are powerful partly for a kid because they're kind of an early moment of seeing how little control adults have over their world at the end of the day.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Say that, yeah, like anything that that gives a small person an indication of the grownups being very, very concerned. I remember that with nine 11 and not to to get on to a tangent of that, but it does track that that seems like a parallel experience.

• 10:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  But when my mom was saying there was a plane crash with such sobriety and I'm sitting there thinking like, well, you know, a plane crash is bad, but why are you talking like this?

• 11:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  And in our family, my mom was pretty little at the time of the JFK assassination, but I do think it's wise to share with some of the younger listeners what this meant for the generation that like she, her parents, it was their anniversary and they're in New York. So, you know, a center of many things and too many places and trains were closed for my grandparents to go out that night. And they were a Republican family, but my grandma cried, you know, it was just, there was enough unity at the time and it was so bizarre. Although I will say four presidents have been definitely assassinated. There are a couple of questions about other poisonings before that, but four definitively assassinated in office and they

• 11:48Speaker 01

  were all in the period from 1860s to 1960s. So that really was a bad time to be a president, huh?

• 11:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Who are our four presidents?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we have, um, Lincoln, obviously was 60, 1865, then James Garfield, 1881, William McKinley, 1901, and then JFK was 1963.

• 12:09Sarah Marshall?

  It's funny, I would have said it was more, but then I guess we got into attempts, you know, like Squeaky Fromm and Gerald Ford.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  And our, our last topic, Reagan.

• 12:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, yes. And America's, uh, the 1980s is special little guy. I feel like we must mention that, what is it, Hinckley has a memoir that's like, you know, Jodie Foster is a lesbian because of me. And it's like, Okay.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  We were talking about this, like, don't open your mouth. We, we were all rooting for you.

• 12:38Sarah Marshall?

  I know. When people like you should talk as little as possible, which as you can imagine is very difficult for me because that's my whole job.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you didn't do this. So I think you get a little more latitude on that.

• 12:51Sarah Marshall?

  It's a very good caveat. See, I need to call you sometimes to like

• 12:54Speaker 01

  In your moments of self doubt.

• 12:56Sarah Marshall?

  Litigate on my defense against my anxiety. I think that would be good.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, some people should have more anxiety about speaking. Some should have less.

• 13:03Sarah Marshall?

  There you go. So yeah, it does. It feels like it was one of these, like, these pretty rare, absolutely earth shaking moments.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  And interesting for us that it's, it's the first time that there really is a 24 hour news cycle. That it's noted as one of the only times early on that the TV stayed on and that people were actually reporting for 24 hours. So thanks for that.

• 13:25Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, look, I never like to bring up the devil, but like, maybe that is when the devil climbed out of a test pattern.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Is that one of those, like, you know, the, like, Vitruvian man circle? And it cuts to like, technical difficulties?

• 13:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, let's just make a devil one of those, you know, because the idea of people needing to be encouraged to pay as much attention as possible to the media at any hour of the day in a way that was ultimately designed for profits is like, no, a big part of how we ended up here with everyone overstimulated and getting dumber all the time.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting because like, this really did merit being there for 24 hours. But I imagine once that, once that seal is broken, then it's hard to not justify, like, hey, we can do this round the clock for profit, even if nobody's dead.

• 14:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And to have the technology to do it.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:26Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, in a weird way, it's like World War II, where you develop all these, you know, tools for warfare and weapons. And then the war ends and you're like, well, shucks. What are we going to do with all this technology? And of course, that did lead to like, major advances in Uh, non-weapon directions as well, but you know,

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:45Sarah Marshall?

  You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  You sure can't. You can't put him back in the devil box.

• 14:50Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah. And so the kind of, I feel like the resonant pop culture images, and I never thought of it this way before, but much like Midsommar, it is daytime horror.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 14:59Sarah Marshall?

  Right? And the Kennedys are riding very slowly in a convertible down the parade route, which I realize this is a reason we don't do this anymore.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Not to say they're asking for it, but in retrospect, um,

• 15:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. You're right. And also not to give too much credit to conspiracy theories, which as we all know, is not something I like to do. But it's one of those things where I'm sure the question of stupid or conspiracy theory comes up a lot.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I feel like there's a good quote, which is said more succinctly than I'm going to say it, but something like, don't credit conspiracy what you can attribute to stupidity. And especially where like multiple government agencies playing with one another is concerned, which is, we'll get to it at the end, but that really is what it ended up being, is a bunch of bureaucratic blunders, plus, uh, you know, evil is always evolving, you know, what threats look like is evolving.

• 15:52Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Cause you look at American intervention in Southeast Asia at the time famously, and you're like, why do we think they would be so competent domestically? If, you know,

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:02Sarah Marshall?

  They're really not doing well.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  A ground war.

• 16:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly. Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  It's like, uh, think after the Revolutionary War, a similar sort of thing, that they were used to fronts of people marching on each other.

• 16:18Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And we essentially would line up from time immemorial and shoot at each other in a line. And for us, the Revolutionary War was the first time when we really got a bit of higher ground in more ways than one, because the Americans knew the terrain and they didn't have to do the, let's all shoot each other in a line thing, but the British did. Anyways.

• 16:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Things are always evolving.

• 16:42Sarah Marshall?

  The thing is, once you start trying to topple other countries, which became a big part of our foreign policy, then you, you don't know the area as well. But that's Getting, yeah, getting into the whole latter half of the 20th century.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Bottom line, I guess, is like government distrust and social unrest can breed a lot of suspicion, even when the government is trying to do something somewhat above board with the Warren Report and Commission. Like, it really shows the ripple effects of mistrust in the government.

• 17:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and this connects with, you know, something I think a lot about the O.J. Simpson trial. Spoilers. And also, I guess, where we are now, where, you know, you have, we'll come back to this story one day, but for now, that you have, you know, the O.J. Simpson jurors really not willing to believe any of the forensic evidence, or at least quite a lot of the forensic evidence being presented to them in a way that's very frustrating and hard for a lot of people to take, and especially emphasizes this great racial divide, because the jurors are mainly people of color and are not inclined to trust the LAPD.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:50Sarah Marshall?

  And white America is absolutely shocked by this, but also, you know, hopefully with the benefit of time, it's possible for everybody to maybe see that, you know, to me, the issue here is that the LAPD had a terrible track record, obviously, and especially in terms of the way that they treated black people who lived in LA.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  So it kind of created that suspicion that anything must be poisoned. It's a great, like, microcosm version of what we see going on here.

• 18:21Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Well, and they were also, by not being believed, being found guilty of something they actually had done, right?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:28Sarah Marshall?

  Because regardless of how they behaved in this case, it also was about how they had behaved as an entity for this entire time. And also, interestingly, you have also a situation, and I feel like this is relevant, where you have, you know, a group who's asking for our trust, who has not behaved in a trustworthy way consistently. And now that they have to actually try and take the evidence they're gathering really seriously, they've been cutting corners for so long that they don't actually know how to handle evidence properly anymore, even if they want to. You know, so this thing of like, looking at the incompetence, especially of groups that are kind of clashing and have overlapping areas of authority, you're like, yeah, even

• 19:12Sarah Marshall?

  if the stakes are incredibly high, you can't rise to the occasion if you haven't been practicing.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's really the magic formula for, maybe for conspiracy theories in general. It's tough when the division is so deep within the country, and this is where you look to leaders who divide rather than unite, which is something that obviously plagues us still. But you'll see how there's kind of strife from both sides. So one side thinks that he's too communist, one side thinks he's not communist enough, and thus, nobody is happy. There's no side that anybody trusts. And then, how are you ever going to believe the findings that comes out of a government that is thus structured?

• 19:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's sounding more familiar than I ever thought it would.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Right?

• 20:01Sarah Marshall?

  And so I feel like there's like, a very strong, just kind of iconic set of images that have ended up in the American subconscious about this, that like, you would understand even like, probably a very small reference to, right? Where you have like, the very photogenic, despite whatever issues are bubbling below the surface, presidential couple who are riding in a very slow-moving convertible, and that they've got the governor and his wife, and what, a police officer in the car as well?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a convertible with three rows of seats, and in the back, you have JFK and Jackie. In the middle jump seats, you have Governor Connally and his wife. And then in the front, you have two Secret Service officers. And it's like a 10-mile-long motorcade, as will come into play. There is also a car behind them with Secret Service agents riding on the jump board. And they will hop off, but we'll get to that.

• 21:00Sarah Marshall?

  You know, hard to imagine that they really went over what to do if this happened, or maybe they did.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:05Sarah Marshall?

  But it's a, but the fact of putting the sitting, I realize this is kind of the reason we don't do this anymore, but the fact of putting the sitting president in like a slow moving, open target is really just something. And it, yeah, it brings up the question of incompetence or conspiracy.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Like if you were playing a video game, this is the ideal way to track a target.

• 21:26Sarah Marshall?

  This is the, the bison in the Oregon Trail of human tragedies where you're just like, well, I can just shoot so many Oregon Trail bison because they walk across the screen like we're low on RAM.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Sitting ducks.

• 21:42Sarah Marshall?

  And so we basically have this very slow moving target and someone, somewhere shoots at the presidential motorcade and hits the president, I want to say two times. And also I can't remember who else gets shot, but I want to say that a couple of people also in the car do. And then we just have this like day of confusion for the American people, from what I can tell, where you have famously Walter Cronkite breaking in to a soap opera multiple times to give updates and tell people that the president has died. And again, in a way, I think immortalized by The Simpsons, taking his glasses off in a way that shocks a nation because he's not a grown up. He's just a man.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  He's one of us.

• 22:25Sarah Marshall?

  And, and of course later we find out, I didn't, well, there's like a lot of aftermath that I won't try and recount, but there's also, and for anyone who grew up watching Parker Posey in The House of Yes, especially the iconography of like Jackie Kennedy wearing the pale pink Chanel suit that gets covered in her husband's brains, or at least that's like the kind of macabre way that we talk about it historically. But there's like something about that image that like I keep picturing in my head. It's like the entirety of the thing in a way. And then we apprehend, the Dallas police, I guess apprehend a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald, who then gets shot in the gut by a nightclub owner like the next day and dies. And then we have to make Kevin Costner movies about it for the rest of our lives. The end.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Naturally.

• 23:10Sarah Marshall?

  And the, oh, and then there's like a guy who's taking video and accidentally takes footage of an assassination. And so it's like, we've had them before, but we've never been able to look at footage of them. And. Hopefully, we won't be doing it again in American history.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, obviously, that's become pretty commonplace. Thinking of the Kirk video that circulated. The Zapruder footage, it's really interesting. This was another turning point, I think, in a resurgence of conspiracy theories, because the film itself was not originally released. The first look that the public got was when the Warren Report itself came out. And that was only in stills. So 64, October 64, pretty quick turnaround.

• 23:57Sarah Marshall?

  That is fast.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  That the Warren Commission releases the report. Yeah. And it's very thorough. We'll go through the process. But people only saw the stills and it's in the motion that we eventually saw in the Zapruder footage when it aired on Geraldo in 1975, that you see some of the things that stirred up footage.

• 24:17Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God, not Geraldo.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:21Sarah Marshall?

  I'm actually having a resume so varied that nobody even remembers that part of it anymore.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  That was, it was huge. It spurred a whole new assassination investigation in 76, because that's the source of that. Well, we'll get to what it was the source of.

• 24:37Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, so let's get into it. So what am I wrong about? And like, what was unfolding in the kind of nuances that it was hard to see at the time? And also, like, yeah, a little bit of like, who was JFK, honestly? Because it also feels like we're so far away from this time now that, I don't know, there's a real risk of aestheticizing it. And it's like, I don't know, you guys, I think these people had some problems. That's my analysis.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would say, like, probably like the moment we'll suggest, you can overcorrect in both directions about who JFK was. He was obviously a very flawed president. And you have Bay of Pigs and all that stuff that I think to go into in any depth would be its own episode.

• 25:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  But he's got the Cold War on his hands. He is a very aesthetically pleasing president.

• 25:27Sarah Marshall?

  He's got the Cold War on his hands. Yes.

• 25:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  And then he's got this beautiful young wife who is very good at tying together loose ends and keeping up appearances. Like Jackie was pregnant during the campaign and still did a fair amount of work and then gave birth to John John, who I had a coworker when I worked in the government who worked with John John while he was famously trying to pass the New York bar.

• 25:58Sarah Marshall?

  Ah.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  But you had this beautiful family. She was the epitome of Catholic suffering hidden.

• 26:06Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  So she gave birth and she had just had a baby die in August of 63. So right before this happened.

• 26:16Sarah Marshall?

  Man. Yeah. And you can see her really being an icon of kind of surviving gracefully for American women. And to that I have to say, that's great. And also like, I don't think you should have to be that graceful.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Like, that should not be our standard, but also hats off to you for going through that.

• 26:36Sarah Marshall?

  Or hats on, because she looked great in hats.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  She looked great in that little pillbox hat. And you were correct about the brains on the suit. In fact, her estate has required that that outfit be held until 100 years after she was alive. So nobody can see it, who sort of overlapped with the event.

• 26:59Sarah Marshall?

  God, fair enough. Can you imagine? Like, Courtney Kardashian would be wearing it to a Planet Hollywood event or something.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Right. Forgot about that. Marilyn Monroe. So obviously, her husband had his dalliances as well. Another source of suffering that she lived through with a sad smile. Poor gal.

• 27:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  So they went to Dallas because we're getting close to the next election. 1960 was when JFK was elected. And it was huge that they got Texas to begin with. We didn't have the party lines that exist now. We still had a lot of Southern Democrats, and that is largely why LBJ was on JFK's ticket. 1960 was that he pulled in Texas, still only won by a narrow margin. So they really had to to fight back against the Republican resurgence that was very racially driven in the South. It's why we ended up losing that whole Southern Democrat wing is that they didn't and don't like

• 28:01Speaker 01

  civil rights in a majority sense. And that's not to say the people fit this. Obviously I'm from a Southern state. I get it.

• 28:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but that enough of them do that they'll vote for it and it can be capitalized on by some of the worst people in the world like George Wallace.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  And the power, yeah, like the power is with the George Wallaces.

• 28:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Even on the Democratic side. So you had like intra-party fighting, likely because of the Southern versus Northern Democrats war. Governor Connally, who was in the car with JFK and one of the Texas senators, Ralph Yarborough, both Democrats were feuding with JFK. So you have war from Democrats. You have Dallas specifically actually went for Nixon in 1960. Prior people from his cabinet and administration had actually been like physically accosted on recent visits to Dallas. So they actually recommended that he not go because it was such a hostile atmosphere.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And he's like, no, it's fine. I'm not really a communist and that's why they hate me. So let's do it.

• 29:08Sarah Marshall?

  So people are like, that's our, that's the communist Catholic president of the United States. Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Disgusting. So the number of shots, because you brought up a number of shots and who was shot.

• 29:18Sarah Marshall?

  I know this is gonna be very important in a second. Yeah.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  So I don't want to get into the specifics until we get into the forensics because I think sometimes if you're introduced to the fake version first, it's tough.

• 29:31Sarah Marshall?

  As so many of us were by Kevin Costner.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Right. So I don't want to get into the real nitty gritty, but Governor Connally was also hit. And JFK, it's largely thought by just about everybody that he was killed by the last shot. And that was the one that went through his head and neck. And that is not really disputed. And that is when you see in the Zapruder footage, and you also have accounts from people like Clint Hill, who was the Secret Service agent who hopped off the running board of the car behind and crawled up onto the trunk, which is also an iconic image because he's trying to get Jackie back in the car.

• 30:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  She's trying to grab pieces of his head.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And you just picture the strife of that moment and like the weird muscle memory of, well, I have to grab that to fix him.

• 30:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. I feel like you can, you can tell that something really disturbs people if we turn it into sort of a series of references and jokes because like, I, I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers again recently and something that really, I mean, it's such a great, all the body snatch, well, the first two Body Snatchers movies are great. I have not yet been won over by the 90s one, but I mean, they're such great movies. And I feel like there's a lot as to why, but in the one from the 70s with Donald Sutherland, there's a scene where, you know, the way these pods work is that they'll kind of send their like suckers into your body and develop a copy of you.

• 31:04Sarah Marshall?

  And then when they're done kind of creating your copy, they'll like suck all the juices out of your body and then you'll just kind of turn into dust. And then the pod copy that's been made of you will like take your like dusty remains out to the garbage man the next morning. It's such a good movie, but there's like a scene where this happens to Donald Sutherland. And it's like, or it happens to a character who he cares about and who he's like holding in his arms, thinking that maybe he can revive them. And then it's clear that like the pod has had too much time and this person just like disintegrates in his hands and like the look of horror on his face.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And like trying to hold on to that person. I think that that's such a relatable feeling. And you think of somebody with her composure and everything that good etiquette demanded of a wife at the time.

• 31:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And she's like trying to put her husband back together like a pie that she dropped on her in-laws doorstep.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  And for propriety too, you know, she held his head and neck until they got to the hospital because it was evident immediately to the doctors there that she was holding it together. And that would have been an awful photo. And it's also part of what probably confused some of the transfer from what was in the car, the clothing left over because she was trying to cover his head and face. How many bullets, where they were, obviously not to blame her, a lot of this falls on forensic teams and more of his leadership down the line with what autopsies and photos demanded.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  But arguably, the propriety went a bit too far, but you still feel for what she must have been going through in that moment and just the days of it. You know, you see that photo of her when LBJ is being sworn in on Air Force One on the way back and she just looks stricken.

• 33:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Like, what the hell just happened?

• 33:07Sarah Marshall?

  That's funny because I know what the images are of it, but it never occurred to me that she was like literally holding his body together.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and still performing. I really enjoy the movie Jackie. I know that Natalie Portman is not a traditional Jackie lookalike choice, but it really humanizes her experience. And I think Natalie Portman does a great job. But that moment of like, the first bathroom that she's able to get to, to cry and wipe her face of his blood and brain matter.

• 33:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Like, when does she get to do that? And when she gets off the plane, she still has on her tights bits of blood and she tells Lady Bird, let them see what they've done to him. So that strength is there, too.

• 33:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. So we have this immediate aftermath. And then in terms of the forensics and who's handling this, I wonder if we should talk about that aspect of it.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can hit it briefly. And I think we'll go into greater detail.

• 34:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  When we get to why certain things went wrong.

• 34:14Sarah Marshall?

  But is there like, is there a thing of like the, you know, the White House being like, no, wait for us to get other better people to do it. Okay.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  But not better, more proper.

• 34:24Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  And that's where you really have.

• 34:27Sarah Marshall?

  Where's Dana Scully when you need her?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I know. She's good and proper. But I think that's a big piece of why things went wrong. In fact, better minds than mine have reached that conclusion that, you know, they wanted him to get military hospital treatment at Bethesda because of his background and that would be the proper place for the president's autopsy to be performed. But they didn't have a forensic team. And for gunshot murders, even to this day, forensic autopsies are crucially different because you don't have things like DNA in a case like this, even in the best case scenario. It's just the path of the bullet, how the injuries on the body, especially on the flesh

• 35:12Speaker 01

  that is going to degrade rather quickly.

• 35:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  You know, exit wounds, where clothing was torn, all of that stuff corresponding to the inside.

• 35:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And part of me is like, let's, I, without being too gross about it, and then I'm like, you know what, let's just be gross. Let's commit to being gross because it is a very forensic-based episode. And I think if you let it, if you let yourself be clinical, you know, because I think that you can talk about these realities without sensationalizing them. And this probably has a lot to do with my mom being a doctor.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:45Sarah Marshall?

  But, I mean, yeah, it feels, it does feel, I imagine that it's like just a reality that you have like a very limited amount of time before the body that you're examining, you know, begins to

• 35:56Speaker 01

  degrade.

• 35:57Sarah Marshall?

  decompose. Yeah. And you don't have the quality of evidence that you once did, I imagine.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Well, that certainly is true. And I imagine that would have placed a pretty hard time limit on a lot of things, even if everything else had gone to plan.

• 36:11Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, they wanted him to lie in state.

• 36:16Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  The Kennedy family slash administration, because obviously we have a lot of overlap between the two. You have Bobby Kennedy in the administration, that was its own. Huge controversy at the time because there were the nepotism questions. Unlike other nepotism related administration choices, Bobby was relatively qualified. So we will give him that. But he also, you know, he's representing the administration and the family. So he takes a key role in this and

• 36:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's odd.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Again, intentions, I don't think you can blame anybody for these things, except for not deferring when they should have deferred. But because they wanted him to lie in state, the person who wrote the autopsy report, the guy who did, you know, not a forensic pathologist, but the doctor who was at the military hospital, which again, also with military, they don't question orders. Whereas somebody who was not qualified at a different hospital may have said, hey, I don't do forensics. I don't know how to do this.

• 37:14Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  But you follow orders when you're in the military. But he completed the report from photos.

• 37:22Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Because they had to get him ready, like.

• 37:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And that is the thing where you're like, okay, I get why people would come up with a conspiracy theory about this because I feel like partly

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:33Sarah Marshall?

  Conspiracy theories exist to like, I feel like I see people, if there's, I'm sure there's a name for this as a logical fallacy, but I feel like I see people doing this all the time of being like, well, I mean, for them to do that, that would be too stupid. They would never do something that stupid.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  There's no way.

• 37:48Sarah Marshall?

  And it's like, I have news for you about people. We do stupid thing. I wake up and I do six stupid things before breakfast, honestly.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Especially with retrospect, I mean, obviously not everything can be accounted for by Monday morning quarterback syndrome, but like, I don't know that a grieving person, even in a position of power who's qualified, when the whole country is there waiting for propriety to tie all these things together, is it weird that they didn't think of this? I don't know, especially when you have a military hospital where no one's saying it.

• 38:18Sarah Marshall?

  Well, as I mean, it's certainly surreal to think of them not, of it not occurring to anyone because in a way how would it, but like, you know, pretty soon the question of who did this and how is going to be like, I cannot stress enough how much time people are going to spend on that, you know, but, but that at the time it feels like a tragedy rather than a mystery.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:39Sarah Marshall?

  Right. So this feels like it's not really an autopsy, but maybe like a fifth of an autopsy or something.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  I think it would probably be good for somebody who died of natural causes. It would have been totally sufficient if we knew everything.

• 38:51Sarah Marshall?

  If it were someone who wasn't the president and who died in a normal way, then it would be great. But unfortunately, all of the relevant details are completely different, so sorry.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  And then there are some things, like there was a shell that was under his coat on the stretcher that he was brought in on. And so that also helped eventually prove that, yes, that bullet that hit the back of his head did exit. It exited and was left on the stretcher because it was in his coat when he was taken in. But when the clothing was separated from the body, it's like, where the hell is this? Is it in his brain still, but they don't see it in his brain? Wait, we gotta put him in the rotunda of the Capitol so we figure out what your report is and sign it because we gotta be done.

• 39:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, well, secrecy and haste are always good for this type of thing.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Awesome, yeah.

• 39:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and it is so odd to think about sort of the White House as an arm of the Kennedy dynasty and not the other way around, which it seems like maybe is what's happening here, too.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think especially in a position like this, there's probably a whole lot of deference given to the family also, because I think of the ferocity and rightful indignation that you feel from accounts of Jackie at this time. And she did not want death photos of her husband getting out there. And so do you defer to that woman as the White House?

• 40:15Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Probably more likely to if her brother-in-law is working there and he also doesn't want them released, I don't know.

• 40:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, well, this is why you can't have the presidency exist above the law, right? Because it seems like if we treated it as we would a normal crime, then people wouldn't have bent the rules in so many different places.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Well, speed is an enemy, too, because, you know, the remedy for anything going astray of the law is kind of destroyed when he's buried. Like, with time, I think any of these decisions could have been challenged successfully, but you can't redo a forensic autopsy. It's it's gone.

• 40:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  So even if you were to exhume him and be as gauche as that would require at the time, you don't see the skin pieces.

• 41:06Sarah Marshall?

  Medicine is a very gauche field, and I think that's one of its best qualities.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I tend to be too, so that's fine. There so there are going to be two paths diverging here, and I wonder when you want to get to Lee Harvey Oswald and his assassination.

• 41:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I was just kind of wondering about him. Yeah, so maybe now, what happens with him? Because the way I think I remember it, and spoilers, I guess, I do think Oswald did it. There's I have never found it particularly convincing, except for maybe in like, the 10 to 15 minutes after watching JFK.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Before Googling, I had the same experience before Googling, like, how much of this was real? Did he really do blank? And then it's like, oh, no, that was for effect.

• 41:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But what I remember is that Oswald shoots the president. He goes to what I like to call the book suppository, because I am so funny. And he flees, and I feel like he ends up in a movie theater for a little while there. Is that true?

• 42:05Speaker 01

  He sure did. Did you also get that, like, chain email in the early aughts that was like, can you believe that Lincoln was shot in a theater? And the guy ran to a barn?

• 42:17Sarah Marshall?

  And JFK was shot in a barn? Question mark.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  I forget what the parallel was, but it was the the book piece and the theater piece. There's something about it. But yes, he was in, he worked for the Texas School Book Depository. And so that piece on its own, I didn't know before going into this. I had some great sources, and I feel like I should have shouted them out earlier. But one of them was the deep dive article in Life Magazine on the Warren Report that was written by then Representative Gerald Ford, who was on the Warren Commission. So he goes through all the findings and whatnot. I did not know before that that Oswald was an employee of the depository. That makes a lot of sense. And also, all these things that tie Oswald.

• 43:03Sarah Marshall?

  Up and coming author Gerald Ford, you know, I just love his journalism.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Christ. I always picture him as Chevy Chase, which is just bad for everybody involved.

• 43:12Sarah Marshall?

  I always picture him as a Simpsons depiction. Do you ever see that episode?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Oh, that's cute. No, I only saw him like, they would always poke fun at how clumsy he was on SNL because it was a very safe joke for them to make, which they love.

• 43:24Sarah Marshall?

  Right. They're like, oh, I love to be provocative. Yeah. Well, in The Simpsons, in The Simpsons, and now we have a president who really looks like he's about to just like tumble down the stairs and we're, no one's allowed to talk about it.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  We don't dare. Yeah.

• 43:40Sarah Marshall?

  But in The Simpsons, George H. W. Bush moves in to Springfield, like next door to The Simpsons, and then Bart drives him insane. And so they leave and then the Fords move in. And Ford comes over and is like, hello, Homer. Do you like beer? Do you like nachos? Do you like football? My name is Jerry Ford. How about we watch football and drink beer and eat nachos? And they both fall over and go, dough.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  See? Okay. So he fell over a lot.

• 44:11Sarah Marshall?

  Very good. This is what I'll do. After the grid goes down, I'll tell people what I remember from The Simpsons.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I would watch it. It's great. This, but boy, this is not selling him as a reliable source, huh? If he falls down all the time?

• 44:23Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. I fall down a lot and I'm pretty scrupulous about facts.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  So great. And he obviously is working from the report itself. And then we have a Nova documentary on the forensic testing that they've done recently. And then there's that Four Days in November book.

• 44:40Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  So yeah, should we talk about Lee Harvey Teabag?

• 44:43Sarah Marshall?

  Let's do it. Yeah. I will just point out that my introduction to this whole topic, I feel, was that as a kid, I watched reruns of The Drew Carey Show. And of course, Dietrich Bader's character is named Oswald Harvey, which you only find out why it's funny as he learned more about American history.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's a fun little treat. This guy, it's so funny that people suspect that, and I think this is born of the sentiment at the time, which was, how can this little nobody of a guy do this? And now, as I'm looking-

• 45:18Sarah Marshall?

  They're always doing this stuff.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, if you're looking at the profile of him now, in our era of mass shooters, which has brought us all very close to expertise of what makes a violent person who shoots a stranger, it's like, this is absolutely consistent with who would try to shoot a president, because he is so uninteresting and so unimportant. In the, the Life magazine piece, the Warren Commission wrote that he had not a single meaningful relationship, and it became clear that never in his life, here in Russia or anywhere else, was Lee Oswald satisfied with the environment in which he found himself.

• 45:57Sarah Marshall?

  Boy, that does sound familiar.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Right? He told his wife, who was a gal that he brought over from Russia, that he would be premier of Mexico in 20 years. Like, no.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  And he was altogether just the worst. In high school, he was evaluated by a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with a personality pattern of disturbance with schizoid features, and called him quite disturbed as a youngster, impacted by emotional isolation and the rejection of a self-involved and conflicted mother. So his mom was a piece of work, too.

• 46:32Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like we're also in classic blame the mother era in psychology, where they're like, mother picked the baby up too much, mother didn't pick the baby up enough, it's gotta be one of the two.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Very true. And also moms weren't allowed to not be parents, so like, you had this problem a lot, that it's like, she didn't really want this child.

• 46:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. So it's interesting that when you force women to have babies who they have neither desire nor ability to care for, that they're, you know, that sometimes it like, is unpleasant for the babies. It's a side topic, but it's relevant.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, God forbid we learn from that lesson, because, you know, there's a reason that they have all those charts of 18 years after Roe v. Wade, that violent crime drops and yada, yada. Anyway- But she she really was a piece of work. She actually is the origin of the Lee Harvey Oswald was a government agent rumor, and it was not a convincing source. We'll get to why.

• 47:24Sarah Marshall?

  She's okay. But yeah, that's interesting.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, she was very, quote, aggressive, dogmatic and difficult. There's a fun description of her in her interview. They said that as they were trying to interview her, and this is a government body, you know, your son has purportedly and by all appearances shot the president. And they said that she would just tell wild stories, frequently forget what she was talking about, meander through blind asides, and then yell at them when they interrupted her to get her back on track, answering the question.

• 47:57Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  And he also had a brother who fled the mom for some stability. So it sounds like he had a rough upbringing, as diagnosed first around age 12, when he went to juvie for the first time.

• 48:09Sarah Marshall?

  And what's the deal with the whole Russia thing?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he was definitely, he was a communist sympathizer, but in the way that a lot of angry young men find causes to be angry about. Like, I don't think he was committed to anything. He got very bored in the USSR. He's behind the iron curtain for almost three years, for two plus years. He brought a wife back. The commission described her as his handsome Russian wife. And she came back with him after his two plus years in Russia.

• 48:44Sarah Marshall?

  I remember finding out that she existed because weirdly, I think there was like a TV movie about her in like the post JFK economy starring Helena Bonham Carter.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 48:52Sarah Marshall?

  And it's just, I cannot imagine being more friendless in a way than being the young widow of Lee Harvey Oswald. And I believe having young kids at the time, like, my God.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, they had two daughters, which is just great, great for everybody.

• 49:10Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  And also, her mother in law was not great or stable.

• 49:14Sarah Marshall?

  The way that men are able to like, you know, and I know women do this sometimes, too, but like, boy, are there a lot of men and non binary people. We can all be all. Awful, don't worry. But the way that men will like, look like, create a human life and like, look at it and behold it and realize, wow, I am the most important person and role model and figure of love and authority for this tiny human being whose soul I'm responsible for. And then they're like, what if I just like, go get caught committing a pointless crime? Or like, what if I, what if I climb Annapurna? What about that?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Duh, right?

• 49:54Sarah Marshall?

  I just had a baby. What if I almost die? I think I should do that.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Well, and it also didn't give him enough purpose. Like, if you wanted to look for ways to influence the world, if you think you're going to be consulate in 20 years,

• 50:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Good grief.

• 50:08Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I guess he did influence the world, but not in a way that he got to hang out and, you know, stroke his ego with.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Well, this is the thing, is like, it's the easiest shortcut to being quote unquote famous.

• 50:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  But, so he's leaving his family a couple of weeks before the assassination too, because he visited both the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico. And this is an oft cited trip. It was very well investigated by the Warren Commission, and it has been speculated upon and fictionalized by folks like Oliver Stone. But really, the consulates largely ignored him, which makes sense. And it made him very angry. He described crushing frustration to his family members, and then wrote a violent complaint letter to the Soviet consulate in DC for them ignoring him.

• 50:59Sarah Marshall?

  What, what do you think? Just, I mean, and I know we don't know, but like, do you have any kind of personal theories about like, what this was about for him? Like, why communism is something to fixate on? Is it like a way to rebel partly?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  I don't know if you've met this type of young man. I certainly have often a white, straight young man who is a leftist.

• 51:22Sarah Marshall?

  You found out about Marxism?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:24Sarah Marshall?

  No, I, yeah, I, I, I sure have. And I have had a bad time. Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I have too, because I, I tend to, early on, take them at their word. And then in practice, it's like, you just wanted something to be angry about.

• 51:41Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Or you were like, already angry generally, and you wanted to pick a thing to say that it was about.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  That's what I mean. Yeah. I remember very clearly during the BLM protests, seeing a lot of white men come out of the woodwork for the marching and the breaking of things. And I don't know where they are now. I don't see a whole lot of policy work from them. I don't see a lot of, you know, day to day posting of things that are helpful and don't center them. So to me, this tracks so much with the exact type of person who's going to do this. And he's running to different places. He's fleeing people, you know, he's going to Russia. He's going on this trip to Mexico. And wherever he goes, there he is. And he's unhappy.

• 52:25Sarah Marshall?

  Classic early twenties behavior, I really think.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Totally. And he buys a bunch of guns, you know, he had two guns on him the day of and actually shot somebody else, Officer Tippett. This is what he was originally arrested for in that movie theater, because he talked to a police officer who essentially was going to ask him where he was going. I think there was probably a way out of this.

• 52:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  That didn't require killing another person, but that was what he was originally found for. But we can talk about his mom as the origin of the government agent rumor now, because it actually dovetails kind of nicely.

• 53:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Because that part is very interesting.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Right? Like, I did not realize both how early this originated. Like, this is not an Oliver Stone thing. This was not a 1990s thing. It wasn't a 1970s thing. And thus, all these things about like, well, did you know he spent time in Russia? Did you know that he went to the Cuban Embassy and had these leanings? It's like, yeah, they did, very early. And there was no other source in the entire investigation with the Warren Commission, in the entire investigation done in 1976 and since. That has shown any connection to anyone of relevance, but he just liked to yell about it. The only source was his mom.

• 53:43Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  And the reason for this, are you ready?

• 53:46Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  So when he went to Russia for two plus years, she never accepted that her son just left her.

• 53:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  He didn't leave her with any money. She became destitute while he was gone. She didn't accept that she could have a boy who just left her for no reason and go to Russia because she was in such a shitty spot.

• 54:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Him having left. So that was the source of her first asserting this was actually before the assassination.

• 54:15Sarah Marshall?

  Really?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, she took this as far as going to DC while he was still in Russia. She wanted to ask the government as an entity to recall her agent's son.

• 54:26Sarah Marshall?

  Uh, yeah, that does. I feel like I have read that Reddit post like this week, basically, you know?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Right?

• 54:32Sarah Marshall?

  Like, that's a real unhinged parent who can't process reality kind of a thing to do.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  And also, he was a dick. Like, she very clearly was destitute, and he was just like, peace. Sorry.

• 54:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And the thing you're saying about him fitting the profile so well that we now understand for kind of, you know, young male American assassin. It's like, yeah, like, boy, has that data set presented itself in the ensuing years.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  And imagine if we had taken it seriously at the time. I was like, this is an archetype that we should take seriously.

• 55:08Sarah Marshall?

  And also, it's not like we didn't have the means to know, because if we look at the other presidential assassins, like.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:14Sarah Marshall?

  Right? Because wasn't it, it was like, of the other three, one of them was like a guy who Emma Goldman found really annoying and who was like kicked out of a utopian commune. And then, you know, you have.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Frustrated actor.

• 55:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And then a young frustrated actor who, whose like, great idea was to shout "Sic semper tyrannus" after murdering the president, which I hate to say it, is very dorky.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  It's dorky. Nobody knows what that means now. I mean. Unless you're from Virginia, because it's not on their flag. But he also was just like butthurt that his brother was a better actor.

• 55:53Sarah Marshall?

  I know.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  You're just a frustrated man. So Marguerite Oswald, his mom.

• 55:58Sarah Marshall?

  That is a hell of a name.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  I love the name Marguerite. I never hear it. It's my grandma's name and this must have torn her up to have the same name as Oswald's mom. But so.

• 56:10Sarah Marshall?

  Mom's Wald.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  So she actually tries to get into the White House when she's in DC. Trying to get them to recall her agent's son. And a while after her trip, nobody talks to her. They ask her to leave. But months after that, she gets a letter from Lee Harvey and he's like, I'm bored here in Russia. I'm coming back. She thinks that this is because her covert request has been granted.

• 56:36Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, yes.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  And that was the only source. She said that the president clearly had accepted her demands. And then after the shooting, she revived this rumor or belief for her. And that was the only source.

• 56:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And again, it's like, I do think that we put a little bit too much trust in sources that are, you know, close to somebody who perpetrated or was the victim of some kind of terrible tragedy, because I think there's room for magical thinking in that, that like we as the public maybe want to latch on to. And then we can use the proximity of the person as a reason to trust them more and ignore the fact that they're in fact more incentivized than the average citizen to want to come up with a story about how this all could have happened in a way that simplifies it.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Or something that we collectively want to believe already, which is that A, we can't trust our government right now and this is true. So B, they must be lying about this. And C, it's very disquieting to believe that just some random little dildo can. Go to his workplace and kill the president. That's too much.

• 57:42Sarah Marshall?

  It is. I don't like it. And yet I like it so much more than, you know, any other theory that anyone could come up with.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I like truth. Yeah.

• 57:50Sarah Marshall?

  I like truth too. Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  But like, I can see wanting to lean into Marguerite's version, but they did. So there are sworn denials from both the Secretary of State Dean Rusk and FBI Chief Edgar Hoover, which like, a lot to be said about both of them. But they also actually went to Moscow's US Embassy to interrogate personnel. They went to all the agencies and had independent people come through agency records that could be related to make sure that nobody was holding out on them. And because of the risk of there being Cold War conspiracies after this, the Soviet government really panicked right after the assassination because they

• 58:31Speaker 01

  were like, oh shit, this could blow up. So they actually sent a lot of stuff over and cooperated in those early days of report forming.

• 58:41Sarah Marshall?

  Huh. Yeah. That's interesting. You don't hear, that's some nice cooperation, I guess.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Love it. I mean, it's self-serving, but.

• 58:50Sarah Marshall?

  Of course. But it's, it's nice to see people act even in their own interests in a way, you know?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 58:57Sarah Marshall?

  Because you see, like, a lot of the corruption today, you know, what people talk about is like, well, you know, people are selfish. And it's like, I get that, but people are being manipulated to act in a way that doesn't even serve their own interests, actually.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 59:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  It's like, these guys, we are proud of Russia for not cutting their nose to spite their face in this instance. Good job.

• 59:16Sarah Marshall?

  And of ourselves whenever we happen to manage it. Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, the other thing that's fun about Lee Harvey was that it seems like his two options that he was entertaining before the assassination, it was either assassination or write a book. And he.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Right? And he went with assassinate, but he wrote an epigraph that suggests that it would not have been a very good book.

• 59:44Sarah Marshall?

  Well.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Even basic words are misspelled.

• 59:46Sarah Marshall?

  I gotta say, I didn't have incredibly high hopes.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, this, and again, this does align also very well with our conversation about, you know, with Hinckley and the Reagan assassination attempt where you have someone who's like, you can see this kind of like indecision and like just drifting around and kind of like, interestingly enough, doing something that affects the span of history is sort of like on a weird whim, you know?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Oopsie.

• 1:00:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I, I gotta do something next week and nothing is jazzing me.

• 1:00:19Sarah Marshall?

  I gotta do something big. It's either a haircut or this, you know?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Bangs, try the bangs next time. But like, super narcissistic and he's living in a delusion world about his relevance. It also made me think of like, how there probably was a red scare shade to the conspiracy thinking too. Like, of course, people want it to be a conspiracy because we have an enemy right now.

• 1:00:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  And that also feels better.

• 1:00:49Sarah Marshall?

  And wouldn't it be nice if the enemy was, was communist and not just like an all American guy?

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Boy, yeah. An angry boy from

• 1:00:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  any place that any of us could be from. Yeah. So I think that's most of his fun background. His wife was very cooperative with the Warren Commission, just speaking to what she must have been going through. I don't, I don't know, man.

• 1:01:14Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay. And something that Mackenzie, I didn't learn until, I don't know, much later in life, but maybe even adulthood was that it seems like part of why this tragedy was able to begin to seem like a mystery to people when arguably it wasn't really very mysterious at all, was that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't linger very long on this mortal plane, which I find so interesting. Can you tell us about that? And like, what, how did, what happened there?

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  I think you're absolutely correct that that is a big piece of why a lot of conspiracy theories were born out of this case. It really is like the perfect storm for all of these conspiracy theories. But yeah, he did not live even a week beyond the assassination and arrest. And I think the fact that another unknown gunman with frankly, not a dissimilar profile to Lee Harvey Oswald himself, just like this random guy with a rough, patchy background and connection thus to all these questionable groups, you know, he was affiliated with different unions in Chicago, which is not a bad word at all, but.

• 1:02:27Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, his name's Jack Ruby. I would certainly hope he's affiliated with various unions in Chicago. And also, would it, would it be fair to say that his life involves broads?

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Um, okay. Both of those are really fun facts because first, he's actually Jacob Rubenstein.

• 1:02:43Sarah Marshall?

  Jacob. Embrace your faith.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Right? Um, he changed it when he moved to Dallas from Chicago. So honestly, fair.

• 1:02:51Sarah Marshall?

  Well, understandable. Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  And two, there is pretty strong evidence actually that he was gay, but um, right?

• 1:03:00Sarah Marshall?

  Jacob Jack Ruby, you get in here this instant.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  But he certainly did facilitate the procurement and transportation of ladies.

• 1:03:11Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Allow me to do a little gay vocal stim. She quotes suddenly last summer, "We procured for him." Thank you. That was Elizabeth Taylor.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Thank you. Perfect. I love it. I thought Liz was in the room. But the, I, yeah, he, he never married. He's his own interesting character on his own, but.

• 1:03:33Sarah Marshall?

  So where, where's our movie? Yeah. Where's our Jack Ruby biopic, honestly? And I'll, and so this, cause you think about it. And I mean, I, again, it's like, this is a case where I feel like the impulse for conspiracy makes total sense to me because it's horrifying to think that, you know, the leader of the free world, especially during the Cold War, can be taken out just by some random antisocial 24 year old. And yet, when you look at American history in terms of assassination, what can't a white 24 year old with no good work prospects do?

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Sarah Marshall?

  In this one field, they're just everywhere and.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  They're prolific.

• 1:04:08Sarah Marshall?

  It also makes total sense to me that like, if you. Had famously assassinated the president and then were, I mean, what you can tell us about the circumstances about this, but if like the public had sort of reasonable access to you, like, it kind of makes sense that somebody would be like, hey, what if I, you know, did a vigilante thing?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Totally. And it was, you know, we were talking last time about people in our family and stories from the public about how earth shattering this was and that it really, there was party line crossing unity about how awful this was. And people said, even after Oswald was arrested, like, he's not going to live to see trial.

• 1:04:47Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Because there was so much hatred on every side towards this person.

• 1:04:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And also I'm actually, you know, if he's not going to be kept in isolation from other prisoners, then I feel like that could have been very dangerous for him too, understandably. Yeah.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, everybody's against him. Rightfully so. Like, I'm not a, an Oswald stan, but, you know, the odds were there.

• 1:05:13Sarah Marshall?

  Although, right now, somewhere out there, there is a 14 year old girl who is standing Lee Harvey Oswald, and I, I am sending her all my best and the best of luck, best wishes.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  I hope she finds good role models to lead her elsewhere.

• 1:05:29Sarah Marshall?

  She'll figure it out, you know?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  So, yeah, honestly, the incident itself was so fast.

• 1:05:36Sarah Marshall?

  Where was he when this happened? To give us, like, set the scene for us here a little bit?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's great because you can actually, it's great. It's interesting.

• 1:05:47Sarah Marshall?

  From a historian's perspective, yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  And especially those of us who did not live through it. You can see so much footage. In fact, there's a famous photo. Do you want to look it up right now? I don't have it saved.

• 1:05:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, I do.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  But it's, it won a Pulitzer Prize because it is virtually-

• 1:06:04Sarah Marshall?

  Give me the words to Google this.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  "Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald" is the title of the photo.

• 1:06:09Sarah Marshall?

  What is it virtually? I'm sorry.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  It's virtually the moment that a bullet goes in to his body. And it was by Robert H. Jackson, not to be confused with- Justice Jackson by the same name.

• 1:06:21Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  But it's a goofy ass photo.

• 1:06:25Sarah Marshall?

  I mean.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Cartoonish face.

• 1:06:27Sarah Marshall?

  Right, exactly. It shows what I imagine to be kind of the surreal nature of the moment where everyone is kind of just like not yet reacting or just starting to react.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Sarah Marshall?

  And Oswald looks like someone just hit him with a snowball.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, he looks like he's saying, "Doh."

• 1:06:41Sarah Marshall?

  It does look like he's saying "doh."

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  It's very anticlimactic. I mean, but it's so climactic that I think that's that juxtaposition is what's so interesting. So he's being moved out of the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters, and they're transferring him to county jail where presumably he would have awaited trial.

• 1:06:58Sarah Marshall?

  With minimal security, I would imagine. What's the story there?

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  I guess. I mean, maybe there's a thinking that there are so many folks around that nobody would dare fire a shot, kind of in the sense of the other assassinations that we've seen fail.

• 1:07:14Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Like John Hinckley was in a crowd, and so nothing really landed with the person that he was aiming at. Like, that is a scenario that occurs a lot, that you want to shoot somebody, but there's too much going on, which is why, in Kennedy's case, having an open car, isolated from everything, moving very clearly in the open was such a good scenario for a shooting. This, maybe they were assuming, like, there's reporters everywhere, we're in the police station.

• 1:07:43Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  There's no way. Or they didn't care.

• 1:07:46Sarah Marshall?

  Right, because you are opening yourself up to immediately being caught, which I presume happens here.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, in fact, as he draws a gun, one of the police who knew him, he had nine criminal charges up until the time he was arrested for this, said, "Jack, you son of a bitch." And so they know this is Jack.

• 1:08:08Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, and they're like, ah, classic Jack. And does he say anything about what his motives are for this, or what's his deal here?

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I just got a photo from you.

• 1:08:18Sarah Marshall?

  What did I get sent to you? Yeah.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Well, it appears that he has a breast on either ear.

• 1:08:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  And he looks delighted about it.

• 1:08:27Sarah Marshall?

  That could sound confusing. He- Standing there with, you know, I would assume a showgirl would be accurate behind him and she abroad, to be sure.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Sarah Marshall?

  And she's got, I think, some sequin pasties on either nipple and she's just got her, she's got Jack Ruby's head sandwiched between her breasts, like a lovely panini. And he looks like he's like mid sentence. And the woman kind of looks like Catherine O'Hara, actually.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  She does. And he looks like he's having an okay time. You know, he looks like one of the Stooges.

• 1:09:01Sarah Marshall?

  Supporting the historical thesis. Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. He did. So he did own a nightclub, strip club. The Carousel Club was the name of the, the place that he owned.

• 1:09:10Sarah Marshall?

  And what in your opinion is his deal? What causes a man to go from mere strip club owner to assassin of a presidential assassin?

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  I think he was.

• 1:09:19Sarah Marshall?

  But quite a sentence, I might say.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  I know, right? In any other context, you'd think it was an error, but I think he was an angry man. It's ironic. We talked last time briefly about how Lee Harvey Oswald was first detained in juvenile detention for truancy. And Lee Harvey was 12 years old, I believe. And Jack Ruby also detained for truancy, his first detention at 11.

• 1:09:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  But yeah, so I don't know. Who can say? I would love to do a deeper dive on him someday because it really is interesting that he maybe was living with a boyfriend.

• 1:09:56Sarah Marshall?

  If you want an episode on Jack Ruby, like, comment and subscribe.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Sarah Marshall?

  Comment, Jack Ruby.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  And he seems uncovered as characters in this play go, you know? There's, there's the vague assumption that he's like mafia connected.

• 1:10:12Sarah Marshall?

  And also to quote Dominic Dunn on the OJ Simpson trial, like even the minor characters in the story are all astonishing.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  They are capital C characters. Yeah. So he, he's also hanging out around the police station a lot after the assassination. And he was very upset about it. One of the early press conferences, several people actually made this correction. So nobody jumped to the conclusion that because Ruby knew this, he had to be involved. But Oswald had been arrested previously in New Orleans for disturbing the peace when he was doing some rally with a Cuban advocacy group. Now, at the press conference, the Dallas police got it wrong and Ruby stood up with a whole bunch of other people and said, no, this group wasn't anti Castro, it was pro

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Castro, because there were two Free Cuba type groups and one was pro, one was anti. So he was clearly very involved, all this to say, in the specifics of the case and who Lee Harvey Oswald was and was like, he's getting invested in this time between Kennedy's assassination and Oswald's. So Oswald falls to the floor. He does not die immediately. In fact, they have time to ask him, anything you want to tell us now? And he shook his head. And also, people outside applauded.

• 1:11:33Sarah Marshall?

  Should have asked him something more specific, but I'm sure it would have been hard to think of something at the time.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  To anticipate the theories that would come out.

• 1:11:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. The last like banner thing about this, in my opinion, is that Nixon, in his response to this, had a classic Freudian slip and said, two rights don't make a wrong of the two assassinations.

• 1:11:56Sarah Marshall?

  Nixon, no. No, Nixon.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  He just said it. So he corrected himself.

• 1:12:02Sarah Marshall?

  Nixon, get it together.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  It was too late.

• 1:12:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, buddy.

• 1:12:08Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, this is all very sad and stupid, but yeah.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  There's a great line in the book that I'm reading right now, Doppelganger, the Naomi Klein book. And it's something, you know, she puts it better than I can, but there's something so frustrating about, and a lot of us will recognize this from the current moment, too, but having to take seriously the threat posed by such goofy, foolish, stupid people.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  And that weird juxtaposition of circumstances when it's like,

• 1:12:39Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  These people are absurd and I don't want to take it seriously, but the threat they pose or the outcome of what they've done is so grave. And our brains have trouble with that. I have trouble with that.

• 1:12:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I think that's, that is a theme that's only sort of multiplied, I guess, since the story we're talking about.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Totally. Cause people are just people and maybe that's like a side effect of the news coverage that we've gotten in the intervening years is like, we learn more about, to the point of many of your shows, like, these aren't these big evil behemoths that we could never understand or conquer. It's just like some guy named Jacob who was mad.

• 1:13:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And you can usually, if not get to the bottom of it, get pretty close.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:27Sarah Marshall?

  But really, right. The truth is that you have this, like this horrifying reversal of the world as you know it. And where my perspective, except for maybe in a 48 hour period after seeing JFK for the first time, has always been, isn't it horrifying? You know, basically, and how do we accept? How much damage? Some random 24 year old man who doesn't feel like he's been praised to the degree that he, he felt necessary.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  That is due to him. Yeah.

• 1:13:54Sarah Marshall?

  Isn't it awful what that kind of combination of alienation and entitlement can create? And why are young men, um, why are so many young men like that? And how do we have less of that perhaps? But then it does seem like a lot of people, and in a way it's hard to fault them, responded to this, especially at the time, this almost impossible to comprehend reversal of maybe what they believe to be the order of things and thought, well, it's gotta be a massive conspiracy because only, you know, a cabal of powerful world leaders acting together could possibly cause something so massive. And it's like, no, it's just, to quote Crossroads, it's just some guy. He's just some guy.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Random evil. I think there's some subconscious comfort.

• 1:14:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  To feeling that there's control, that there is some cabal that is like.

• 1:14:44Sarah Marshall?

  That someone somewhere is. Control.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, omniscient daddy, because then we can just swap out that person and then everything will be fine. But I think now more than ever, it's so ironic hearing you describe Oswald rightfully as he was, that audiences today, and maybe that makes this a good time for this episode, more than any time in the past, can recognize that like, there is a huge capacity of one angry young man who feels he hasn't gotten what he's owed and everybody in his life has let him down, but he's very important. Like, the capacity of that archetype to do tremendous harm, especially with

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  a gun on a random day, is, we all know it. More than people in 1963 knew it, we know it now.

• 1:15:32Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and then, and then it feels like also that in the, that this began, maybe this phase of sort of public assassinations as something that people kind of learn to fear. And, you know, especially if you're a civil rights leader, or engaged in civil rights, and the kind of positive reinforcement that that sends to the assassinating type, I guess, that like, you can get a lot of attention if you destroy someone who's trying to do something good with their lives.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And actually, this takes us nicely, without getting us into any of the findings, to why the Warren Commission was necessary. I mean, we all know why.

• 1:16:11Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yes, we do. But I mean, I bet we can sure imagine. But yeah, tell us about that. And what is the Warren Commission? And whose idea is it? And how does this kind of get set in motion? Tell us about that a little bit.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  First of all, it's daylight, tons of witnesses, slow moving, presumably, security. Why isn't it easy to figure out exactly what happened in all the details? So that, you know, it's a fair question, and it was definitely a prevailing one, especially as people grasp for answers. And within a week of Oswald's shooting, which was only a couple of days after the assassination itself, so within two weeks of the assassination, also, 60% of the public responding to a Gallup poll, so pretty reputable pollsters, thought that there was a second shooter.

• 1:16:58Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Isn't that remarkable?

• 1:17:01Sarah Marshall?

  And so that's a narrative that's out there kind of from the beginning.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Very early.

• 1:17:05Sarah Marshall?

  And why do you think that is?

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  I think it's because of Jack Ruby, and I think it's because. We didn't have easy answers when the circumstance seemed to, you know, Dealey Plaza, where this happened is essentially a bowl, which makes for a lot of problems with acoustics and we'll get to that down the line with with forensics. But, you know, it's daylight, the Secret Service exists. This was a planned parade. There are tons of witnesses. Why didn't we know that night? And part of that could be kind of the instinct of needing someone to blame or similar to that instinct of like, why don't we have resolution on this now? And that transforms into, well, we should have resolution now because I'm very disquieted.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  And here are all the reasons I can think of why we should have an answer now. And you know how group think kind of goes with those moments.

• 1:17:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and so much of the show has been about that.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  And I think the red scare too.

• 1:18:03Sarah Marshall?

  Right, and this idea that there are these nefarious forces trying to destabilize the United States. I mean, and it's not the most unreasonable thing to think because this is a time when like, certainly the United States is pulling a lot of shady shit in terms of espionage. And it's really, you know, we're receiving that in return.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it also is easier to unite against a common enemy, yada, yada.

• 1:18:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  And it's out there pretty early that he had connections to pro Cuba movements, that he had spent time behind the Iron Curtain. So we needed fact finding publicly and assurances for the American people. And then for lawmakers, doubly cautioning, you know, behind the scenes from the administration that like, there are huge implications if there's a communist conspiracy here. So let's determine whether that happened and then put it to rest with the public.

• 1:18:55Sarah Marshall?

  Right, and to be fair, like, if you were investigating this, you would want to look into that. Like, it would be ridiculous not to at the time. Yeah, it's just that if you've disproven it, you know, everybody gets to move on.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Then move on. And, and like we said before, the Soviet Union actually cooperated a lot pretty early on because they didn't want this to be, you know, a mutually assured destruction trigger.

• 1:19:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  That's like, we didn't even kill this guy and now we're getting blamed for it.

• 1:19:22Sarah Marshall?

  Right, they're like, listen, we don't want that either. I mean,

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Like, hold on.

• 1:19:27Sarah Marshall?

  We saw that Strangelove movie. Yeah.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  We didn't kill your boy. It's, yeah. So we convened this commission under the name of Chief Justice Earl Warren. And this is really funny. So the first article that is thought to acknowledge the rash of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists was a piece in The New Yorker in 1967 called The Buffs by Calvin Trillin. And it's talking to and about all these quote unquote assassination buffs, self appointed, about why they think certain things went wrong. And we'll touch on some of it. It's so interesting how easily these theories are put to rest with like, one piece of forensic evidence. For instance,

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  they talk about like, well, one doctor says that they, in Dallas, was interviewed and said that they were sure there was an entry wound in his throat. We already talked about the weirdness with the autopsy. There was an exit wound in his throat. So for a physician to eyeball entry versus exit, there was a bullet wound in the throat, but then there was this tracheotomy performed to put the tracheostomy in, and that masked that wound. So.

• 1:20:36Sarah Marshall?

  So something where there's one, like, very clear explanation for it that doesn't take too long to think about. Yeah.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Once you know the information, it's, it's clear, but you could see how somebody would put that together with their own impulses potentially. And one of the folks interviewed in The Buffs, long story short, too late, was talking about how they were suspicious of the Warren Report and Commission because Chief Justice Earl Warren wasn't liberal. He was appointed by a Republican. And so that, in retrospect, is really funny, too. And why is that? Because I know you know this.

• 1:21:11Sarah Marshall?

  Well, isn't famously the Warren Court basically the, like, period in the Supreme Court where we introduced all of, I always feel that I'm going to use the wrong legal language, but basically like that we had all these cases that led to the precedents that give defendants the kinds of rights that people have been upset about ever since that are basically considered to be far too liberal, if anything.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  And yeah, absolutely. And other civil rights issues were touched on by the court. The point being that Chief Justice Earl Warren actually became a very liberal jurist, even though he was Republican appointed. So all of these things that you can see going into.

• 1:21:52Sarah Marshall?

  So, you know, a little, a little bit, a little bit of inspiration for anyone listening who might be considering that. It's fun.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Good point.

• 1:22:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, okay. So we have the Warren Report and I would imagine that like basically immediately there would be the need for some kind of an inquest.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would think. So this had to happen.

• 1:22:10Sarah Marshall?

  So and is it the fact that there's like, there's the investigation of the assassination? And then is the Warren Report basically an investigation of the investigation?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  No. So the commission itself is probably in large part a stand in for the trial of Oswald. Obviously, the mission is slightly broader because there's the why did this happen? Not just proving one person's guilt, but like getting into bullet trajectories and findings and all that. And it ends up being a 296,000 word report. So the Warren Report is just what was issued by the Warren Commission. So the commission is what does all the investigating. And it was pretty like comprehensive. They have a presidential panel and that that was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. It had Arlen Specter on it, who is famous for switching

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  parties in Pennsylvania.

• 1:23:04Sarah Marshall?

  A parade of stars.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And their process involved, you know, going to government agencies, getting assistance from agency lawyers, then having independent commission people checking the agencies work so that if any punches were pulled, they would verify that against internal confidential records and make sure that nobody was hiding anything or couching anything. They got depositions from all the relevant parties. So Marina Oswald, the handsome Russian wife that we talked about, Marguerite Oswald, the domineering mom who had her own conspiracy theories, and then Jack Ruby, who they called a sad and strange little man.

• 1:23:46Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Sarah Marshall?

  Should we wait? Should we make merch that says sad and strange little man?

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Sad and strange little man. I would love a hat that said that.

• 1:23:55Sarah Marshall?

  But you know what? Sometimes we all wake up and are like, oh, I am a sad and strange little man.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  That's gonna start being like the stim I use to to hate on myself whenever I'm feeling bad.

• 1:24:07Sarah Marshall?

  Slick in the mirror like you sad.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Strange little man. It's such a good dig from somebody in a position of authority, too.

• 1:24:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  And then they they just like followed all the rumors to their origin because by this time, obviously, you know, you have 60% of the public right after who thinks that there's a second shooter. So all these rumors, at least phase one of the rumor mill is out there. The information exists already. So they checked into these things and followed each rumor to its origin, which I think is a good way to do it. So they traced that government agent rumor back to the mom and also found that there were no other sources. And they checked into the trip to Russia. They went to Russia. They looked into Ruby's prior associations. They looked into what security measures failed. And they also went to Dallas and they reenacted the Zeppertor footage, which they had in full, frame by frame.

• 1:25:02Sarah Marshall?

  And could you tell us very quickly, like, what is, why do we, why does that footage exist? And what is this film for?

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Sarah Marshall?

  You know, just if someone's listening who's like, I am a Martian and I am inhabiting a human body and listening to this podcast. First of all, thank you for spending your limited time listening to this. But yeah, what is, what is the effect of watching this film? And and what is the kind of little backstory behind it? Because it's such an odd, it is such a weird stroke of faith that this exists at all.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. Send more Chuck Berry to the aliens. So Abraham Zeppertor was just like this, this dressmaker who was out to watch the parade with a lot of Dallas. And he had what we would consider a pretty primitive eight millimeter video camera and ended up capturing the moments of all of the shots fired. And it became a huge basis for the investigation. And all of the images that you have seen, all of them, of the assassination and the moments immediately before and after. Are from that footage. So we are really at the advent of video, but not very far into

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  it. So the fact that anybody had a camera trained on the car and was filming at this moment is huge for the investigation.

• 1:26:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And it's just, it's an eerie thing to watch.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  It's very eerie.

• 1:26:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Cause it's just, you know, and of course it's, I think, unless you were some kind of like AV buff, like any kind of consumer home camera, you wouldn't be recording sound. And so it's just this, like this eerie little soundless, it's, you know, what about a minute, maybe less than a minute, this very short clip, um, that it's

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, less.

• 1:26:41Sarah Marshall?

  Even the fact that it exists is, is eerie in itself, I think.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  It is. And the, the fact that he was able to kind of Steadicam it

• 1:26:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Pretty well. I mean, it's, it's grainy, but he does keep it trained on the car.

• 1:26:56Sarah Marshall?

  That's how you know Bigfoot wasn't in the film. Cause when Bigfoot goes up, the camera starts jiggling wildly famously. And it's the law. So yeah. So I imagine of course, like from, like mainly kind of from the perspective of ballistics and trying to evaluate like, well, was there a second shooter or not? Is that the most important thing about it?

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, in retrospect, it maybe has caused more confusion than good because of some neurological impacts of where the wound happened. And that's super interesting. Well, I can't wait till we get to the forensic stuff because that wasn't really known at the time. But I think part of why they did not release it to the public initially, in addition to all the, you know, propriety concerns that the Kennedys had, that it does cause more confusion potentially because there's not a whole lot of new information. We knew the car was there. We knew that he was hit in the head, but this shows the back

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  into the left kind of impulse that JFK's body does when he's hit. And that made people think that it couldn't be from the depository because of where that building was located in relation to the car. If he's reacting to the blow of a bullet, he should not be moving back into the left. So that caused a lot of confusion. I think it shows where people were sitting in a very basic sense, and it gives at least like one piece of media that you can examine to get the best view of where everybody was.

• 1:28:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and also something, I guess, to compare eyewitness testimony to as well.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And when you you were used to doing investigations without video footage, it's like, well, yeah, this is great. This is better than we would have had in any other circumstance.

• 1:28:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  So they, the commission goes to Dallas, group field trip, they go to reenact the footage frame by frame, because the way that they knew it at the time of the report and the way that it was initially released is like frame by frame pieces of information. So they try to replicate each frame from the footage. On location, they get the same car or the same type of car.

• 1:29:12Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  They get a man with JFK's same build.

• 1:29:16Sarah Marshall?

  Wow, I had no idea they did this. This is very impressive to me.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 1:29:21Sarah Marshall?

  Poor Governor Connally, he has to go in the reenactment?

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  He doesn't.

• 1:29:25Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, he doesn't. Okay, thank God.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  They do get him a stand-in, but the stand-in is wearing his actual coat with the shot in it.

• 1:29:31Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  Right? So it's really thorough.

• 1:29:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  And they use a, they have to use like a surveyor, those, you know, three-point surveying systems with different people operating it to get the exact location, because there was no modern technology. I mean, we take for granted how easy that would be now.

• 1:29:50Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  But they painstakingly recreate.

• 1:29:53Sarah Marshall?

  There's a reason we put all that time into figuring it out. Yeah.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they actually mount the recovered rifle from Lee Harvey Oswald in the same window with a camera fitted to the scope. So it sees exactly what he saw, right?

• 1:30:07Sarah Marshall?

  See, this is the thing, right? It's like, because I know that people, we love a conspiracy. It's comforting. It's, you know, et cetera. But like, is there anything better than truly putting your all into trying to figure out exactly what happened as well as you can? Doesn't this sound fun, you guys?

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  I think this sounds so fun and it also, I can picture it because I'm kind of like this. Like the commission doing such a good thorough job and thinking like, once I give them all the information

• 1:30:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  and show them how thorough I was and why we reached the conclusions we did, like then they'll get it. But then people still reach other conclusions and/or don't read all the information.

• 1:30:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that like, there's this element where the law itself or the American legal system is kind of based on this thing that's always been very beautiful to me, which is this professed belief in the value of everyone agreeing to like have, you know, a trial or a hearing and, you know, these various ceremonies that are meant to be a search for truth. And then how it seems like, despite that being the claim, so often in practice because of like, this or that law, this or that statute, this or that filibuster, like the sort of handshake wink wink kind of a thing that can happen.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:25Sarah Marshall?

  But a lot of human behavior and impulse and excuses and sort of, you know, our various cultures of lying and corruption and whatever else like get in the way of that. But that the fact that there will always be people who believe in that and take it literally. Um, there'll always be that redemption there for me or that possible redemption.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:31:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  And we can embody that redemption because this really does bring us back to that theme of like, when a government breeds mistrust and when a society breeds mistrust too, because there were also societal triggers for this, you know, the anti civil rights crowd, et cetera. That when there's so much social unrest and government mistrust, people will be suspicious even when you're being candid and even once you've decided to put all the information out there. So it's tough because the people who did the Warren Commission investigating probably didn't create the bed that they were sleeping in to that extent, even though they were government folks. But like, this is a, there were two dozen 500 page volumes of what they put out. And then the Warren Report is

• 1:32:32Sarah Marshall?

  Let's read it.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  A summary of it. Jesus fuck.

• 1:32:34Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Wow.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  So it's like, it's so much information and the report itself is, is that almost 300,000 word report.

• 1:32:43Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  And all this goes into it. And so basically what they conclude, and then we can break down the rumors, but they conclude that there were three shots fired and one missed. Governor Connally feeds into a lot of conspiracy theories because he fervently disagrees based on what he heard.

• 1:33:02Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Which is tricky, right? Because it's like, on the one hand, I feel like

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  He's a victim, you know, like he went through this.

• 1:33:09Sarah Marshall?

  He's a, he's a victim of that. And he, you know, and he has a closeness to this that basically almost nobody else will ever have. And yet, you know, as far as I can tell, I'm not an expert, but like, based on the research that I've done and the way this has come up and what I've looked at, experiencing something traumatic can enhance your memory of it and can also make that memory harder to access accurately. And it, I don't think there's a hard and fast rule. I think both of those things happen to us, you know?

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  I think they're both true. Yeah. And I think that like, your brain is probably going to prioritize the processing of other information than shot number.

• 1:33:45Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And survival related information, because you know that you have to protect yourself in that moment.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And your loved one, because he's with his wife, Nellie. So

• 1:33:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:55Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  And the president. I mean, you're also there with the president of the country. And, and it, like we said, and as will become really relevant in the forensic, like, audio testing, it's a bowl. It is a, an urban atmosphere that's a bowl, Dealey Plaza. So that is terrible for accurate acoustics.

• 1:34:16Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And is that because of there's so much more echo potentially?

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So it's, it's off of all these buildings. Apparently in like, war atmospheres, this becomes a nightmare in figuring out where shots are fired also because it's bouncing off buildings of different materials and different sizes. And you just can't, your brain can't account for what that does to sound.

• 1:34:39Sarah Marshall?

  And also, interestingly, like, you know, because of our proximity to World War II, you know, and also Korea, for what it's worth, there would be so many of the people investigating this who did have some kind of experience with, with wartime or combat. And, you know, who would have some of that in. Insight because it's interesting to think about demographically, you know?

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'll end this part with something that I'll definitely reiterate. But somebody from the Nova documentary said, what you think happened to JFK says more about you than it does about what happened to JFK.

• 1:35:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:35:14Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Yeah, I think that's true. And it is like, it's one of those stories where there, especially as we have kind of investigated and re-investigated, and there have been so many theories over time that there's kind of something for everyone to pick to sort of, you know, show what resonates with you because you have so many options to resonate with.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:35Sarah Marshall?

  By now.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  And different varieties of conspiracy too. Like you can pick your favorite that fits what your leaning is.

• 1:35:42Sarah Marshall?

  You probably have every conspiracy theory flavor, and I know we're probably going to get into some of that next time. But yeah, tell us a little bit about what we're gonna, what we're gonna talk about when we, when we return to the investigation.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think this is the, the really meaty stuff. And I want to do two different stages of rumor fodder. I have it in my outline as like fodder one, fodder two. So like where these things were born, what the people who believed them thought, or what the public thought. Once we get into the more niche theories and branches of information, it'll less be the public and more what this camp thinks. And then the second stage of rumors, because there's a whole bit of fallout from the report itself, that people had either made up their mind already, or this didn't resolve their questions, or it raised more questions, et cetera.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  So there's this first wave, and then we'll have a little beat for when everybody learned about the Zapruder film in motion. There's a second house investigation of what went on. They release a new report, kind of to appease the public. And then the 1991 JFK movie revives this whole thing from the seventies to nineties. And then we'll have the last list of rumors.

• 1:37:05Sarah Marshall?

  Again, it feels like we're kind of looking at like different generations of Americans kind of bringing new baggage to this as well.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 1:37:13Sarah Marshall?

  And also, I mean, would it be, would it be fair to say that we're kind of looking at? The evolution of the American conspiracy theory, because it feels like whether we know it or not, it seems to me that like a lot of the kind of Trump era conspiracy theories that we're living with and, and you know, living through in many ways, because of course, there are so many conspiracy theories, especially online, that it seems like A, you're able to sort of germinate faster because of the way we communicate now. And the way we can sort of be siloed into people who are, you know, equally conspiracy minded as opposed to just trying to talk to whoever we happen to work with, like we used to do back in the day. But the, the way that people try and make sense of what's going on politically in the world we're in,

• 1:37:55Sarah Marshall?

  it feels like this is like where we developed our American culture of conspiracy theory making. And I wonder if we're maybe even in a way going to kind of get into a little bit of a taxonomy of American conspiracy theories with the responses that we can see people having to this.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  I would love to do that. And it hadn't occurred to me to track it so closely to the respective eras. But I think we can, we can do that as we go through these two lists specifically, because the source for the first list of rumors at large is this 1964 Life Magazine deep dive into the report by one of the commission members, Representative Ford at the time. And so that really captures the minds at the time. And then this second phase of rumors that's addressed in the new forensic testing in the Nova documentary and some other things that have gone into it is more representative of, I think the documentary came out right before Trump.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  So it's even removed from our current reality and we can touch on where we've gotten now when conspiracy theories are espoused by the White House in many contexts. And that's very different, very new in this volume.

• 1:39:08Sarah Marshall?

  And this beautiful, wonderful, full circle moment

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  Isn't that nice?

• 1:39:14Sarah Marshall?

  Of, isn't that special? Because, you know, the White House used to inspire crackpots who refused to accept the laws of physics. And now that's who works there.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:24Sarah Marshall?

  And so it just goes to show something.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  It shows something.

• 1:39:29Sarah Marshall?

  And we will talk about it all together.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  We'll hold hands and figure it out.

• 1:39:34Sarah Marshall?

  We'll hold hands and figure it out. I'm just, I don't know. I love talking to you about these topics in a way because I feel like. There will always be people who, despite how much conspiracy theories become our national pastime, really cannot give up the belief that explaining the truth as clearly as possible and putting your whole heart and soul into it has value and matters and will change people's minds, because you can't change everyone's mind. But that doesn't mean that you don't still have to do it.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where's that line? I don't know. I haven't found it. I, maybe I'm just as stubborn because I keep trying to do the same thing. But there's got to be some merit to somebody standing by the truth, right? So we're doing it.

• 1:40:22Sarah Marshall?

  Right. But it's kind of like, I think, you know, when I was younger, because I was raised on like triumphant 90s legal thrillers, right? Where I was like, well, you just like, you enter your evidence, enter the record, and then you say you can't handle the truth. Or no, I guess that's what you say if you're testifying. You say something else and you

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  This military law doesn't even count. That's fine.

• 1:40:45Sarah Marshall?

  You bring in your surprise witness at the end, and then everyone goes, oh, my goodness. Well, I guess I have no choice but to accept the truth, despite how it challenges my previous worldview. And then you grow up and you learn that things are perhaps more complicated than that.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  It's wild. I think that truth won't get people out of some ways of thinking.

• 1:41:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Well, and also, I think it's like, it's kind of like a moment of really maybe renewing your vows with the truth in a way, and like choosing to love it, not because it fixes everything all the time, but because you still care about protecting it, even if it doesn't have the power to stop everybody in its tracks, the way you maybe once thought when you were younger.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  And it's better than not being with the truth.

• 1:41:32Sarah Marshall?

  And it is vulnerable, in a way you maybe didn't imagine, and needs to be protected.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you like being with the truth more than you like not being with the truth, to continue the metaphor.

• 1:41:43Sarah Marshall?

  And that also doesn't mean I'm going to light my home with stark overhead lighting, you know? Because like, the truth can still be cute.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  The truth can have brain recharge time.

• 1:41:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  It's imperative.

• 1:41:55Sarah Marshall?

  The truth can promote sleep hygiene.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I'm really excited for next time.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:42:01Sarah Marshall?

  And until then, just like, keep looking for the truth, keep researching, keep just finding joy in learning things, everybody, because I think it's just the best. And I think a lot of that is its own reward, too, you know? Because the more, the more we seek out information, I think, the more often we feel truly connected to each other. Because if we get, if we create a worldview out of wishful thinking, then that inevitably will distance us from the people who can't confirm the reality that we want to be true. And we drift farther and farther away from each other. And we can't afford that.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  The truth, as they say, is out there.