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Peter Jennings (Voice Over) It was 40 years ago in this small plaza that John F. Kennedy was murdered. What happened in Dallas that day shook America every bit as much as Pearl Harbor and, more recently, the events of 9/11


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Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Friday afternoon, only hours after the assassination, Jack Ruby closed the Carousel club.


Joyce Gordon

Former Exotic Dancer



Jack was hysterical. He said, "I will shoot the son of a bitch if I have a chance." And he kept going on about Kennedy's children not having a father.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) At midnight on Friday the 22nd, Ruby was at police headquarters when Oswald was paraded before the press. Over the weekend, he was described by his sister and friends as "upset," "broken." On Sunday morning, the 24th, Ruby's roommate described him as "mumbling, jabbering, not making sense." At 10:00 on Sunday, the press was waiting for Oswald to be transferred. At 10:19 AM, Ruby got a call at home from one of his strippers, Little Lynne. She wanted him to wire her $25 so she could meet her rent. Just before 11:00, Ruby left his apartment with one of his dogs that he loved dearly and drove to the telegraph office. He parked and left the dog, Sheba, in the car.


Burt W. Griffin

Warren Commission Staff Lawyer



This makes no sense. You're going to plan to kill somebody and you bring your dog down to the killing?
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) At Western Union, Ruby waited his turn in line. His wire transfer was posted at 11:17. Ruby then walked the one block to police headquarters. Oswald's interrogation had taken longer than expected and delayed a few minutes more when Oswald asked to change his clothes. Jack Ruby walked in to the crowded waiting scene at just about 11:20. Oswald appeared at 11:21.


Earl Ruby

Brother of Jack Ruby



Jack loved President Kennedy. And Oswald was walking with a smile on his face. Jack told me. And he couldn't believe that. He was smiling for having killed the president. And Jack became all excited. And he pulled out the gun and shot him.
Reporter

There is Lee Oswald. He's been shot. He's been shot. Lee Oswald has been shot. There's a man with a gun. It's absolute panic.
Hillel Silverman

Jack Ruby's Rabbi



In his distorted mind, he did the right thing. That this man killed his president. And he loved his president. And he was taking justice into his own hands.
Reporter

Here comes Oswald. He is ashen and unconscious.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The entire episode was on television. The public watched in disbelief. In less than 48 hours, the president had been murdered and his assassin silenced. The floodgates on conspiracy were wide open.


COMMERCIAL BREAK
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) On Monday, November the 25th, 1963, President Kennedy's body was carried through the streets of Washington to Arlington National Cemetery. There are indelible moments that day which are a painful part of modern American history. The muffled drums for a dead president so young. The riderless horse. The President's son, John- John, saluting as his father passes. The nation was deep in mourning. In Texas that same day, Lee Harvey Oswald was buried. His wife, Marina, was there, and his mother and his brother, Robert. And that was the day that Jack Ruby, under very heavy guard, was transferred to the county jail.


Hillel Silverman

Jack Ruby's Rabbi



I said to him, "Jack, did you have any kind of connection with Oswald or with people?" And he denied it vehemently again and again and again. He said, "I'll swear on this Bible I had nothing to do with anybody else. I did it all by myself." This is what he said to me.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The people who knew Ruby didn't believe he was part of a conspiracy. But millions of Americans did. And President Johnson worried about it.


Jack Valenti

Aide to President Johnson, 1963-1966



What he wanted was a report that would hopefully would allay the fears, the anxieties and some of the conspiratorial darkness that had, was populating too many people's minds at the time.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The President decided to appoint a commission to investigate the assassination. And he persuaded the nation's Chief Justice, Earl Warren, to lead it


Robert Goldberg

Author, "Enemies Within"



The Warren commission was created for two main reasons. One was to settle the mood in the United States. But there was a second very key reason, and that was to dispel any rumors of foreign intrigue. We're living at a time of Cold War, where there is great tension in the air, great fear in the air that there is a Communist conspiracy, directed out of Moscow, which is seeking to destroy the free world and then the United States.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Many Americans believed that Oswald's time in the Soviet Union and his admiration for Fidel Castro were proof somehow of a Communist conspiracy.


G. Edward White

Author of "Earl Warren"



The longer the Warren Commission takes, the longer the rumor mills turn. So the pressure is enormous.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) President Johnson pressed the commission to work quickly and finish before the 1964 presidential election. The investigation lasted for only ten months. But it built an overwhelming case against Oswald. 25,000 interviews were done. Oswald's wife, Marina, was called. So was his mother and his brother, Robert. There were 3,000 pieces of evidence. Firearms tests showed that the bullets which hit the President could only have come from Oswald's rifle. His palm print was on the stock. His prints we on the boxes in the sniper's position at the book depository. The commission found persuasive evidence that President Kennedy and Governor Connally had been hit by the same bullet. The commission concluded that Lee Oswald acted alone. There was no evidence, the Warren Commission said, of a conspiracy. But when the commission published its report in September 1964, many Americans simply did not believe it.


Local Resident

I think there were more involved in it than just Oswald.
Local Resident

I think he was working for the CIA, myself.
Local Resident

I don't think that all the facts were brought out.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The commission was accused of covering up a conspiracy.
Burt W. Griffin

Warren Commission Staff Lawyer



The accusation that we had a predetermined idea to find that there was no conspiracy and that Oswald was the assassin is completely false. Let me say to you that, the one thing I wanted to do was find a conspiracy. I was a 32-year-old lawyer at that point. And I had political ambitions. If I could have found that Oswald didn't do it, I'd have been the Senator from Ohio and not John Glenn.
William T. Coleman

Warren Commission Staff Lawyer



I would say we did a thorough search and we discovered all of the evidence. And I think the best proof is, it's 40 years later, and nobody's come up with any statement of anybody else who did it.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) But those Americans who pored over the 888 pages of the Warren Report, and its 26 volumes of supporting evidence, found inconsistencies and outright mistakes, which simply fuelled the conspiracy theories. And there was hardly a word in the Warren Report about the Kennedy Administration's determination to get rid of Fidel Castro, whom Oswald so admired. Castro had established a Communist government allied with the Soviet Union within 100 miles of Florida. The secret campaign to get rid of Castro was so important to President Kennedy that his brother, Robert, the Attorney General, ran the operation. The CIA supported guerrilla raids into Cuba. It recruited assassins, Cuban exiles and members of the mafia, to get rid of Castro in any way they could.


Sam Halpern

Former CIA Official



It was top priority. Nothing else mattered. And that was the feeling we got from Bobby, particularly. The object was very simple. And I'll give you the exact words that were used. "Get rid of Castro and the Castro regime."
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) And then on September the 9th, 1963, in a widely published interview with the Associated Press, Castro threatened American leaders. "We are prepared to fight and answer in kind," he said, "the United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe." The people who wrote the Warren Commission Report were never told why Castro would make such a threat.


Michael Beschloss

Author "The Crisis Years"



If Americans now look back at the Warren Report and say, however good it may be, the people who wrote it did not know a Cardinal fact, and that was that the Kennedy Administration was trying to kill Fidel Castro.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) There is not a word in the Warren Report about this. Not a word which suggests that Castro had a motive to assassinate President Kennedy. President Johnson always expressed his public confidence in the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Oswald acted alone. In private, he believed something else.


Joseph A. Califano Jr.

Aide to President Johnson



President Johnson said to me, on more than one occasion, you know, his statement was, Kennedy tried to get Castro, Castro got Kennedy first. There's no doubt in my mind that President Johnson went to his grave believing that Castro was behind Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John Kennedy.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) In the 1970s, during Vietnam and Watergate, Americans had to confront a painful reality. Their government had lied to them on a very grand scale. And maybe the government had lied about the Kennedy assassination, too.


Anchor

The pattern that we have now established for Lee Harvey Oswald, is obviously the pattern of a man being run by the CIA. There's no question of it.
Anchor

Just want to tell you that 72 percent of the American people do not buy your report. They think at worst it's fallacious. At best it's incompetent.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The Warren Commission was being denounced in many quarters as an outright fraud and part of a far-reaching conspiracy.


Commission Official

Do you solemnly swear that the testimony ...
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Under this kind of pressure, in 1976, the House of Representatives created a Select Committee on Assassinations to deal with conspiracy once and for all.


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



When the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination was made public, critics and people generally ...
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The committee's chief counsel directing the investigation, was G. Robert Blakey.


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



We made it our central program to see what might have changed since 1963. And what had changed since 1963 are advances in science and technology.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Using the latest technology, the committee reexamined the Warren Commission's evidence. Experts analyzed the bullets that hit the president, the x-rays and the photographs from the president's autopsy, and the movements of President Kennedy and Governor Connally in the Zapruder film. The committee reviewed all the evidence, and reaffirmed that President Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. But was he part of a conspiracy? The committee combed Oswald's life for links to foreign governments. It heard testimony from one of the KGB officers who had handled Oswald's file when he defected to Russia.


Uri Nosenko

Former KGB Official



He was nobody. He was a tumbleweed.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Yuri Nosenko later defected to the United States and still lives here under an assumed name.


Uri Nosenko

To recruit such person who defected in Russia, American, returns back in America and to give him mission to kill, no way. KGB never will go on this. Because it's so obvious.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) As for a Cuban connection, the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro had been uncovered and made public a year before the House Committee began its work. Committee investigators went to Mexico City to look into allegations that Oswald, during his 1963 visit, conspired with Cuban agents.


Edwin J. Lopez

Investigator, House Select Committee



We spent hundreds of hours following up stories that when Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico City, that he'd met with Castro sympathizers, that he'd met with people from the Communist party and we were able to verify not one of them, not a one.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) In 1978, Chief Counsel Blakey and several members of the committee actually went to Havana to interview Fidel Castro.


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



I sat in President Castro's office. And albeit diplomatically, looked at him, in his eyes, and said, "Did you kill John Kennedy?" and he said "No." and then he told me why it would have been a foolish thing for him to have done.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Castro told Blakey that it would have been "insanity" for him to attack Kennedy. "That would have been the most perfect pretext," Castro said, "for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years."


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



We looked as best we could for evidence that he might have done it. And we couldn't find it. That doesn't mean he didn't do it. It just means on the basis of the evidence that I have, I don't think that he did.
Official

They be so identified and so ordered into the record.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The SpeCIAl Committee of Congress spent two years on its investigation. And near the end was preparing a report saying that the Warren Commission was right. Oswald had been the sole assassin and no one had conspired with him, not the CIA, the FBI, the Soviets or the Cubans. But in the very last week of the investigation, a team of scientists surprised the committee with evidence that appeared to prove a conspiracy.


Official

With a probability of 95 percent or better, there was indeed a shot fired from the Grassy Knoll.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The scientists had analyzed a sound recording, overlooked for almost 15 years, that was made at the time of the assassination. The scientists said that as the president was shot, a motorcycle policeman in the president's motorcade was driving through Dealey Plaza with his microphone stuck in the "on" position. The sounds the microphone picked up were recorded at police headquarters. The recording was noisy, with static. Listen. But the scientists said that with speCIAl equipment they could identify four gunshots.


Official

What you have just heard were the sounds picked up ...
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) To the House Select Committee on Assassinations, this was a huge shock. Four shots was one more than Oswald had time to fire.


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



Four shots in the plaza. That meant there were two shooters in the plaza. Two shooters in the plaza equal a conspiracy.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Chief Counsel Blakey was convinced by the scientists. And he became a believer in conspiracy. Blakey was an expert on organized crime, and he decided that the mob had conspired to kill Kennedy. The key to his theory was Jack Ruby.


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



I see Jack Ruby's assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald as a mob hit. I got organized crime connections for Ruby that just go on and on and on. Why would the mob want to take out Lee Harvey Oswald? To ask that question is to answer it. There is only one answer to that, they had a hand in the assassination.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president's brother, had been leading an unprecedented war by the Federal government on organized crime. In April, 1961, Carlos Marcello, the mafia boss of New Orleans, was seized by Federal agents, forced onto a plane, and deported to Guatemala. According to Blakey, Marcello became so angry at the Kennedy administration that he conspired to kill the president.


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



He took the deportation personally. He hated the Kennedys. He had the motive, the opportunity and the means in Lee Harvey Oswald to kill him. I think he did.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Marcello eventually got back into the United States, and according to Blakey, he recruited Lee Oswald to shoot the president, and Jack Ruby to make sure that Oswald never talked.


Ralph Salerno

Expert


I have the greatest respect for Robert Blakey. But I cannot join him in this hypothesis.
Official

Committee calls Mr. Salerno.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The late Ralph Salerno knew as much about organized crime as anyone in America. He was hired by Blakey to be the committee's mob expert. He thought his former boss's theory was wrong.


Ralph Salerno

Expert


The theory is Ruby is taking out Oswald so Oswald can't say anything. Somebody has to take out Ruby so he can't say anything. And then, somebody has to take out the guy who took Ruby out. It becomes an unending dilemma. So, it doesn't work quite that way.

Ralph Salerno

Expert


Mr. Genovese was at that meeting.
Ralph Salerno

Expert


I reviewed for the committee the electronic surveillances that the FBI had in, on organized crime figures all over the country. And there was no indication at all of their involvement. Since that time, since that time, up to the current day, you have had a large number of high-level members of organized crime, have made a deal with the government and testified against their fellows. None of them has ever suggested that they knew of, or even heard of involvement by organized crime in the death of President Kennedy.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The most critical evidence in the Blakey theory was the police recording, the sounds picked up by the motorcycle policeman's microphone. It was this evidence, the scientists said, a gunshot tests in Dealey Plaza, that established the near certainty of two shooters, one in the Book Depository, and the other on the Grassy Knoll. But the scientists admitted that their conclusion was based on a major assumption. On November the 22nd, the motorcycle with the open microphone had to be in a very particular place when the first shot was fired. Within this pink circle, at the corner of Houston and Elm Streets, right next to the Book Depository. The committee said that HB McLain was the motorcycle officer with the open microphone and that he was within that circle when the first shot was fired. But McLain told the committee that he was half a block away when he heard a shot.


HB McLain

Dallas Police Officer, 1953 - 1981



So they just assumed that it was mine, where their acoustic people said it should be. But I don't care what they say. It wasn't mine.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The committee found otherwise.


G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel, Select Committee



Our best judgment with what we knew then, was it was HB McLain. If you could prove to me that there was no police officer in the place where he had to be, you would falsify my theory.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) Computer animator Dale Myers has done just that.


Dale Myers

Computer Animator



This is the film taken by Robert Hughes. The president's car now turning the corner underneath the Texas School Book Depository. Moments later we see HB McLain rolling into the shot, as he heads up Houston Street. What's important to note, though these cars that are seen here on Houston Street are also seen in another film, the Zapruder film.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) By analyzing all of the films of the motorcade, Myers has created a second-by-2nd timeline of Officer McLain's movements through Dealey Plaza.


Dale Myers

Computer Animator



By comparing common elements we've tied all of these films together in time so that now we know, beyond any doubt, with absolute certainty, where HB McLain was at the time of the first shot. Now, this view right here represents that moment. The equivalent of Zapruder frame 160. The limousine is here on Elm Street. HB McLain is back here on Houston Street, about 170 feet from the pink circle. So, in fact, HB McLain is not where the acoustics evidence predicted he was. And therefore the acoustics evidence is invalid.
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The committee's acoustic findings were rejected by the FBI and by an independent panel from the National Academy of Sciences. The three scientists who presented the evidence supporting a fourth gunshot declined to be interviewed for this program. The House Select Committee tried, as the Warren Commission had tried, to convince most Americans of what really happened in Dealey Plaza. They both failed. For millions of people, the man with the answer would be the Hollywood filmmaker, Oliver Stone.

COMMERCIAL BREAK
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) In 1991, the movie director, Oliver Stone, introduced a whole, new generation to the Kennedy assassination. No book or television program, no investigation has done more to promote the idea of conspiracy than Stone's "JFK." Kevin Costner plays the District Attorney in New Orleans, Jim Garrison.


Kevin Costner

Actor, as Jim Garrison



President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government. And it was carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's covert operation apparatus. Among them, Clay Shaw, here before you. It was a public execution. And it was covered up by like- minded individuals in the Dallas police department, the secret service, the FBI, and the White House, all the way up to, including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, whom I consider accomplices after the fact.
Robert Goldberg

Author, "Enemies Within"



Stone has convinced me that the most powerful historians of the 20th century are filmmakers. It is those images that we remember. And most Americans know of the Kennedy assassination through Oliver Stone's mind and Oliver Stone's images.
Actor

Do you realize that you're damaging the credibility of the country, possibly destroying it?
Kevin Costner

Actor, as Jim Garrison



Let me ask you, let me ask you, is the government worth preserving when it lies to the people?
Peter Jennings

(Voice Over) The film makes a hero out of Jim Garrison, who was the DA in New Orleans from 1962 to 1974.


Oliver Stone

Director


He is the only public offiCIAl who did bring a prosecution in the murder of John Kennedy. I think he should be applauded for being the first person in the United States to say the Warren Commission was wrong.
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