Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Assassination of JFK About this episode Anyone alive at the time remembers the day President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, on November 22 1963. In this episode, Dan provides a moment-by-moment account of the day that shocked the world and speaks with Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post journalist who has spent years researching the event to discuss the aftermath of the assassination, the theories, and what the public was never told by the White House and the CIA.
Archive courtesy of NBC.
A version of this episode was first released in November 2021.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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0:00 Dan Snow? Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.
0:31 Dan Snow? Hi folks, this is an episode we released a few years back. I did have my braces on at the time, so I sound a bit different. I was having some important dental surgery at the time. But it is one of our favourite episodes, so bear with me. And this is the end of the JFK story that we've been exploring on the show this week. So if you're a long time listener, it is a refresher. You might have heard it before, but it's worth a re-listen. So enjoy.
0:54 Dan Snow? Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Anyone who was alive at the time seemed to remember with great clarity where they were when they heard that John F Kennedy, the President of the United States, had been shot dead in Dallas. It's one of those extraordinary waypoints in US 20th century history. He'd been elected in late 1960, a very close run election. He was young, he was charismatic, he was the first Catholic President of the United States. He seemed to embody the idealism of a new generation of Americans. Americans that had grown up following the First World War, had served often during the Second World War, and had lived through one of the most extraordinary revolutions
1:39 Dan Snow? in household prosperity in the history of the world. America had launched itself into a position of global hegemony, extraordinary superpower status, backed up by revolutionary technology. Not least the nuclear technology, but also things like ballistic rockets that would see humans reach the moon within a decade. Also the beginnings of a computing revolution. He seemed like a new president from a new generation for a new era of history. On the 22nd of November 1963, he was shot dead.
2:15 Dan Snow? In this episode, I'm taking you through a step-by-step account of the assassination. I'm also going to be interviewing Jefferson Morley. He's a Washington-based author and veteran journalist. He's one of the most knowledgeable authorities on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So it's a hybrid. It's a mixture of one of my explainers with an interview with a bit of a legend. Let's hear from Jefferson Morley and me as we take you through one of the most famous days in history.
3:03 Dan Snow? It's the autumn of 1963. JFK, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and his advisers were preparing for the next presidential campaign. Although it hadn't been formally announced that he was going to seek renomination as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, it was clear that JFK was going to run. At the end of September, he travelled west. He'd spoken in nine different states in less than a week. And he used the trip to kind of rehearse talking points. He talked about things like natural resources, conservation efforts, education, national security, and world peace. On November 21st, JFK and the First Lady departed for the two-day, five-city tour of Texas.
3:47 Dan Snow? The first stop was San Antonio, and JFK ended the day in Fort Worth.
4:03 Dan Snow? The next day was the 22nd of November, 1963.
4:08 Dan Snow? At 6:30 in the morning, a young man, 24-year-old man called Lee Harvey Oswald, went to work. He was employed at the Texas Book Depository Building in Dallas. He was alongside his colleague, Buell Wesley Frazier. Oswald is carrying something along and tells Frazier their curtain rods for his room. Oswald has a remarkable biography for someone so young. He'd been placed in juvenile detention at age 12. He was assessed as emotionally disturbed, having had a very disjointed family life. He attended 22 schools in his youth, and he joined the Marines at age 17. He was court-martialed twice. He was jailed.
4:50 Dan Snow? He defected to the Soviet Union and did return to the United States in 1962. Thirty miles east of Lee Harvey Oswald's place of work, President John F. Kennedy is at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth. It's 7:00 a.m. He's getting ready for his day. He's going to give two speeches, then leave Fort Worth for Dallas and drive in a motorcade through the city. Kennedy has just picked up the Dallas Morning News. He sees a now infamous "Black Border" ad, similar to a newspaper death notice which accuses him of treason. He makes his speeches, and then he and Jackie head to Dallas in Air Force One. Air Force One lands at Love Field in Dallas.
5:35 Dan Snow? JFK and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy are met by the press and crowds.
5:40 Speaker 01 The president is up to the fence now, shaking hands with people, the president and his wife. This is great for the people and makes the eggshells even thinner for the Secret Service, whose job it is to guard the man.
5:53 Dan Snow? 11:45 a.m. The motorcade. The Kennedys join Texas Governor John Conley and his wife Nellie in an open-air limousine. Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife ride in another limo nearby. In Fort Worth, the president specified that he wanted to be accessible to the people. He wants the bubble top off as much as possible, does not want Secret Service agents on the back of his limo. 11:50 a.m. Lee Harvey Oswald at the Book Depository.
6:28 Dan Snow? Multiple coworkers see Oswald on the first floor of the book depository eating lunch. Simultaneously, the motorcade leaves Love Field and begins the drive through Dallas.
6:40 Dan Snow? Noon, the motorcade heads through downtown Dallas, passing through crowds of around 150,000 people.
6:51 Dan Snow? 12:29 PM, Dealey Plaza. The president's limo turns onto Elm Street.
6:58 Speaker 01 The president's car is now turning onto Elm Street and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the trade market.
7:04 Dan Snow? The first shot is fired. It misses the president. A fragment from the bullet or debris from the street hits a man called James Torg, who is watching the motorcade in Dealey Plaza. 12:30 PM.
7:19 Dan Snow? Assassination.
7:19 Speaker 01 It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route. Something, I repeat, has happened in the motorcade route.
7:26 Dan Snow? A bullet strikes the president in the back while he waves, causing Kennedy to go into what doctors call Thornburn's position. It's a common neurological response to spinal damage.
7:37 Speaker 01 Stand by, just a moment please. Something has happened in the motorcade route.
7:41 Dan Snow? The third shot is fired. It hits the president on the back right side of his head, causing a portion of his skull behind his ear to blow out.
7:49 Speaker 01 There has been a shooting. Parkland Hospital has been advised to stand by for a severe gunshot wound. I repeat, a shooting in the motorcade in the downtown area.
7:58 Dan Snow? The governor of Texas is also badly wounded. Mrs. Kennedy immediately climbs onto the back of the limousine. She later says she has no recollection of doing so. When she returned to her seat, she said repeatedly, "They've killed my husband. I have his brains in my hand." Right after the third shot is fired, Sheriff Bill Decker orders Dallas police officers to the railroad tracks behind the fence on the grassy knoll. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the fateful day when JFK was shot in Dallas.
8:35 Dan Snow? Jeff, thank you very much for coming on the show.
8:37 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me, Dan.
8:38 Dan Snow? So, there's a scene of chaos. How quickly after that third shot is fired, does the limousine race off to a hospital?
8:47 Speaker 02 Immediately. The limousine turns onto Elm Street. A series of shots ring out. Governor Connally struck in the back. President Kennedy struck in the back. President Kennedy struck in the head. A bystander is struck by a missed shot. The Secret Service driver immediately takes the car to the nearest hospital, Parkland Hospital, with the press car in hot pursuit. They pull up at Parkland. They've called ahead. The trauma team is ready. The orderlies take the president, alive but badly wounded, out, put him on a gurney and take him into Trauma Room One in Parkland Hospital. Governor Connally, also wounded, is taken into Trauma Room Two. In Trauma Room One, doctors converge and try and save Kennedy's life. He is still alive. He has a heartbeat, but he can't speak.
9:33 Speaker 02 And he suffered a massive wound in the back of his head. The press car follows, and Merriman Smith was in the press car. He was a veteran reporter for United Press International, followed the president wherever he went. He was a soldier. He recognized the sounds of the shots. And he was the first one to call in the story. He calls his editors in New York, says, "Three shots were fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas today." And by 12:30, 1 o'clock, that news is already beginning to hit the air. You know, radio announcers and TV announcers put that on the air. Shots were fired at the president's limousine. Dr. Robert McClellan was one of the doctors who examined and was trying to save Kennedy's life, one of the senior doctors on the scene. He stood at the head of the gurney and he observed Kennedy's head wound,
10:18 Speaker 02 which was so severe, he knew that he was not going to survive. It was indeed a fatal shot. And within half an hour, his vital signs had ceased and he was dead. And that announcement went off at about 1 o'clock Central Time on November 22, 1963. So, about 90 minutes later, Dallas police arrested a man, Lee Oswald, in the Texas Theater. He had been seen sneaking into the theater and they rushed in. And arrested him, and he was charged with assassinating the president. Oswald, a 24 year old ex marine, denied that, denied it vociferously. He said, I didn't shoot anybody. He said it repeatedly. And he said, I'm a patsy. I'm a patsy, meaning he's the fall guy for somebody else. Okay.
11:03 Speaker 02 So this is a shocking event. The president is dead. The country's in shock that next day. Vice President Johnson is sworn in as president. And on Sunday morning, Oswald is taken from the Dallas jail where he's being held and questioned by the FBI and Dallas police and taken to a more secure jail on national TV. And as this happens, as Oswald is brought out, a man steps out of the crowd and shoots him and kills him. And that man was Jack Ruby, the owner of a Dallas nightclub and a man with aspirations to join organized crime. So you have the astonishing assassination of the president, followed 36 hours later by the assassination on live television of the supposed assassin.
11:46 Speaker 02 So a completely surreal set of events.
11:49 Dan Snow? I was gonna say, also surreal is Bob McNeil, the legendary news broadcaster who I grew up watching, where he was looking for a phone box to call in the news and Lee Harvey Oswald walked past him, apparently, on his way out of the book depository. Crazy.
12:03 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. So, yeah, the newsmen are calling in the story, what happened? And the president is killed on November 22nd around lunchtime, 12:30. Oswald's arrested later that afternoon. He denies that he is involved in shooting the president. He's interrogated at length, although without a tape recording going, we only have the notes of that interrogation. And the next day, on Sunday, November 24th, when he's taken out, he is shot dead himself. So the other important thing to understand about this chain of events is it was that afternoon, on the afternoon of November 24th, that the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, communicated. And they decided what they were going to do about what had happened.
12:48 Speaker 02 And they both said the same thing. We need to get out information that this man Oswald acted alone. We want to cut off all speculation about his motives and his foreign contacts. This man acted alone. The President of the United States and the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States decided before the President had been buried and before the investigation had really begun, what conclusion they wanted. They wanted to find that this one man alone did it. And so, the FBI did that. They came back three weeks later and said, "This guy Oswald shot the President. We don't know why." And then Ruby shot Oswald because he felt like it. So, that wasn't a very satisfying conclusion to anybody, much less to a country and a
13:31 Speaker 02 world grieving the loss of a potentially great leader. And so, President Johnson appointed the Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. And the idea, Johnson's idea, was the Dallas Police would not investigate this murder, the FBI would not investigate this murder, Congress would not investigate this murder, only this commission would do it. And he stacked the commission with Washington establishment figures, prominent among them, the former Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. And so, the FBI ratifies the lone gunman theory, and that's all it is, a theory, among many other theories, and the Warren Commission starts to investigate.
14:12 Speaker 02 And what happens is, the CIA pretends that they knew nothing about this guy, Lee Harvey Azow, which was simply false. It was a cover story to hide the agency's continuing interest in Oswald from November 1959, when as a young serviceman, he defected to the Soviet Union, moved to the Soviet Union out of sympathy to communism. And for the next four years, the CIA monitored Oswald quite closely. That was never shared with the JFK investigators. The Warren Commission came to the same conclusion that President Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover wanted, that this one man acted alone for no discernible reason. And this was the real problem with the Warren Commission report and with the whole official story.
14:57 Speaker 02 I don't even say "story" anymore. It's the official theory. It's no more credible, and a lot less credible, than other theories of Kennedy's Assassination, but the official theory is this guy killed the president for no reason. And Jack Ruby came along and killed him because he felt like it. And there was no politics involved. There was, and that's what Johnson wanted. That put the thing to rest. At least it seemed to. The press came out and said, this Warren Commission, this is a wonderful finding. They've proven this beyond a reasonable doubt. Let's move on, was the general message of the government.
15:30 Dan Snow? More on JFK after this.
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17:35 Speaker 03 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
18:14 Dan Snow? Why do you think we get these, well, you call them conspiracy theories, these alternative explanations for what happened that day?
18:20 Speaker 02 The set of circumstances was surreal, and the fears of conspiracy were created by those circumstances, not, I might add, by conspiracy theorists. The first week after the assassination, there were no conspiracy theorists. There was only the official story that one man had shot the president for no reason. That was the story of the Dallas Police, that was the story of the FBI, that was the story of the White House, that was the story of the CIA. But when pollsters went out and talked to the American people and they said, who do you think was responsible? Already, two-thirds of people who responded to two polls in November 1963 said more than one person was involved. So the strange, baffling circumstances of the crime and the execution of the chief
19:04 Speaker 02 suspect created this fear of conspiracy, this suspicion of conspiracy. It was not conspiracy theorists. So that's the story that has come to us over the years and is still really unresolved, you know, 58 years later.
19:18 Dan Snow? Geoff, how would you characterize the Kennedy administration? What kind of president was he, Geoff?
19:23 Speaker 02 Who was Kennedy? Want to understand why he was killed. Kennedy was a popular liberal president, was the youngest man ever elected US president, the 35th president, elected in 1960. He was a new style of politician. The modern era of featuring charismatic politicians, actors as politicians, Kennedy really inaugurated that era. He was a good-looking man, he was handsome, his wife Jacqueline Kennedy was very chic. He really had a star quality to him. So that was a striking thing about him. Politically, a liberal, but very cautious, not left-wing by any means. His policies on Cuba and Vietnam, though, gave him serious enemies within the US national security community.
20:08 Speaker 02 Kennedy had declined to overthrow the government of Cuba, not once, but twice. And that was a prime goal of the CIA and the Pentagon in 1960. Fidel Castro had taken power in Cuba and led his country on a kind of leftist revolution, completely intolerable to the United States, which was long used to dominating Cuba and Latin America. And so, they wanted to assassinate Castro and overthrow him. And that became the goal of the CIA. And so, in 1960, early 1961, President Kennedy had only been president for a few months, the CIA launched an invasion of Cuba, hoping that this would spark a revolution that would
20:51 Speaker 02 overthrow Castro, who had only been in power for a year or two. The invasion failed, and Kennedy refused to support the invasion with air support, with US planes. And the people who concocted this plan in the CIA, and their allies among the Cubans opposed to Castro, never forgave Kennedy for refusing to come to their aid. Kennedy, on the other hand, had been told this plan was going to work, and he didn't need to do anything, and the United States wouldn't need to intervene. Cuba was not a particularly important country to the United States, economically or strategically, so he refused to invade Cuba. And the Cuban exiles and CIA officers felt bitterly betrayed.
21:31 Speaker 02 That feeling, that feeling of betrayal that surrounded Kennedy, continued a year later, in October 1962, with the events known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
21:44 Speaker 02 In 1962, the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba to keep the US from invading and overthrowing this government. It was a communist government. The Soviet Union supported it because part of the socialist brotherhood, and they wanted to deter the United States from overthrowing communism. So Cuba becomes this flashpoint in the Cold War. It's not an important country politically, it's an important country symbolically. Can the United States prevail, or will communism prevail in Cuba? During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's generals said unanimously, invade, overthrow, destroy him, and we'll solve the Cuban problem forever. Kennedy didn't want to do that, and Kennedy feared, quite correctly, that if he invaded
22:27 Speaker 02 Cuba, the result might be a nuclear war. After all, the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons on the island. So Kennedy proceeded very carefully, and he tries to negotiate the withdrawal of the missiles. He doesn't want to destroy them militarily, he wants to withdraw them. And after two terrifying weeks in which nuclear war seemed very close, and probably was, Kennedy gets the Soviet Union to agree to withdraw the missiles. Well, that was very popular with the public. Kennedy shoots up in the polls right after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. For Kennedy, the experience of being close to nuclear war was educational. And in 1963, Kennedy really wants to wind down the Cold War.
23:11 Speaker 02 He does not want a nuclear war. He fears nuclear war. And so he lays off Cuba, he doesn't do anything to overthrow Castro. He's trying to withdraw from Vietnam, despite pressure from his generals to escalate there. He pursues a Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. A kind of more symbolic than real, but the first arms control agreement between the two superpowers, which are really at each other's throat and on a hair trigger. And Kennedy's trying to relax the Cold War throughout 1963. So he's a popular liberal president. Staying out of war in Cuba was very popular, and Kennedy was doing well in the polls in 1963. But it was also a time of political violence in America, and let's not forget that.
23:53 Speaker 02 In June 1963, Medgar Evers, the head of the NAACP... The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was assassinated in Mississippi because he had been pressing for the end of Jim Crow, for the end of legal segregation. This was very controversial in the United States at the time. Legal segregation had been the law for a century. The civil rights movement, with the support of Kennedy and Johnson, was demanding these rights and the federal government was finally coming around to ensuring civil rights. While Evers was assassinated. In the fall of 1963, someone planted a bomb in a church in Birmingham, Alabama, and killed four little girls, African-American girls.
24:35 Speaker 02 Kennedy's living in a dangerous time, a time of political violence, and he's also made some enemies in the national security community. And in that context, that's when the assassination happened. The Kennedy has been killed, supposedly by a communist, then the communist is killed. I mean, it's no surprise that people quickly rejected the Warren Commission and began to develop other ideas. President Johnson himself appointed the Warren Commission, publicly endorsed its lone gunman finding. Privately, he never believed it. He never believed it. On three different times, he told people Oswald might have been involved, but other people were involved too. Johnson was quite sure of that.
25:17 Dan Snow? So you've been at the forefront of trying to find out more, and you've been suing the CIA, you've been waiting for new documents to be released. Tell me, how's that struggle going?
25:26 Speaker 02 Well, you know, it's endless. I was in court with the CIA for, believe it or not, 16 years. I filed suit because I wanted to create a paper trail and hold them accountable for hiding records. And I managed to do that, and I got some records. But this work requires infinite patience because they are an intelligence agency and they have quite strong powers of secrecy to this day. I think that we have learned a tremendous amount about the events of 1963 in the last 20 years. After Oliver Stone's movie, the US government was shamed into releasing most of its records about Kennedy's assassination. Those records had been secret for 30 years. And when Oliver Stone made a movie about the assassination and it made a big deal
26:11 Speaker 02 about these secret records, they finally started to come into the public record. And we've learned a lot since then. And there's a couple of things that we know now that we didn't know then. The first was what I mentioned before. The story that the CIA didn't know anything about this guy, Lee Oswald, that was a bald-faced lie. They knew a lot about him. They had been following him closely for four years. That's one thing. A second thing that came out in 1997 was a secret Pentagon plan to provoke a war with Cuba. This was a war that the generals approved in 1963, the generals who opposed Kennedy's more liberal foreign policy. And the plan was to stage a spectacular crime in the United States and arrange for the blame to fall on Cuba.
26:56 Speaker 02 It's a black operation in intelligence parlance. You take an action and you make sure that your enemy is blamed for it. And that's how you, you know, debilitate and destroy your enemy. And the CIA is very involved in this plan. The CIA's role is to produce the evidence, quote unquote, that Castro was involved in some terrible crime. And these planners who were working for the Pentagon had very specific scenarios. One was hijacking a plane, faking a hijacking of a plane. Another was a terror attack in Washington or Miami. A third was to attack a boatload of Cuban refugees. And the United States would do this, and then they'd blame Castro for it and create the evidence to show that Castro was involved.
27:38 Speaker 02 And then the United States could say, look, this guy's a threat to international peace. He's acting beyond the bounds of civilized nations. We are justified in overthrowing him. That's how the Pentagon wanted to solve the Cuba problem in 1963. Nobody knew about this plan. No assassination investigators were ever told about this plan, and for obvious reasons, because there was a spectacular attack on an American target on November 22nd, and CIA assets immediately set out to lay the blame on Cuba. So. Operation North Woods, as this plan was known, serves as kind of a template for what happened in Dallas on November 22. So what we're looking for today? The rest of the Operation North Woods documents.
28:21 Speaker 02 We have a bunch of them, but there are still portions of those that are classified. We want to see the records of CIA personnel who knew about Oswald before the assassination to explore the possibility that he was manipulated and that he was what he said he was, a Patsy. Will we ever learn the story? I think we will, and I'm hoping that all the records will come out and we'll have a better explanation of why the president was killed.
28:49 Dan Snow? Now, we spoke to Geoff in November 2021. So since then, in the March of this year, the US government, as a result of an executive order from Donald Trump, President Trump, they released thousands of previously classified CIA and other agency records related to the JFK assassination. So now the vast majority of the government's JFK records, over 99%, we're told, are publicly available at the National Archives, if you want to trawl through them. They've only got some few minor redactions. And it seems as though, to give a praisey here, it's a huge job, but it does seem as though these new documents, they give an insight into intelligence operations and surveillance and CIA activities during the Cold War. But it doesn't seem to be the case that there is a smoking gun in these newly released files.
29:30 Dan Snow? They don't change the official conclusion of the assassination investigation. What they do is give a bit of extra context and shed more light into the CIA's prior knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald. It confirms that they were surveilling him prior to the assassination, which perhaps in itself does raise even more questions.
29:48 Speaker 02 The official story that this guy came out of nowhere and shot the president, that's false. He didn't come out of nowhere. He was watched by the CIA for four years. They watched him right into Dallas. So what's the explanation for that? We still don't have a good explanation. That's where things stand today.
30:06 Dan Snow? Geoff, thank you very much for bringing us up to speed. This is the story that never ends. It's fascinating, eh?
30:11 Speaker 02 Yes, it is.
30:14 Dan Snow? Thanks so much for listening, folks. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe we'll be revisiting this story again in a few years' time. If those remaining 1% of the files are released, maybe the Grassy Doll shooter is in that 1%. Who knows? Now, don't forget to give us a review wherever you get your pods. It really helps others to find this show. And I'll see you next week. We're going to do a deep dive into the Battle of Little Big Horn. It's a mega episode, this one. You don't want to miss it. Bye-bye.
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