Why People Think The Government Killed JFK

(dramatic music begins) - [Newsman] The president's car is now turning on to Elm Street in open limousine parade. (gunshot fires) - [Johnny] There's a cover-up that's about to happen here. - [Newsman] This is a situation and I read, "Kennedy is shot in head.

" - [Johnny] The assassination of a president and then a scramble by the U. S. government to hide information from its people.

- So much information was hid from the American public. - [Lyndon] How many, how many, how many shots were fired? - [J.

Edgar] Three. - [Johnny] The question of who shot JFK and why has riveted America since that horrifying day 60 years ago. But over time, it's become clear that the FBI and CIA kept information hidden, not just from the public, but from the commission in charge of investigating the assassination.

This has fueled an understandable doubt in the official account, including, by the way, Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who took JFK's place. Congress even came out in the '80s saying that this was probably a conspiracy, and the public ran wild with this.

They came up with hundreds of suspects of who could have been involved in the assassination. Theories like this thrive when government authorities aren't transparent with their people. So let me show you how this happened.

Let me explain the official story and why that story has been hit with a wave of doubt over the decades and explain that unlike a lot of conspiracy theories, doubting the official story here isn't as crazy as you might think. (tense dramatic music) - [Journalist] This was a turning point in American history. People all of a sudden decided, "I'm not sure they're telling us the truth.

" People loved John Kennedy. He was this good-looking guy who was always hanging out with his beautiful family and he just seemed to instill a sense of confidence in people. Kennedy rode this positive perception up the ranks of American politics to become the 35th president.

This was in the early '60s when America was in a giant time of transition. - Oh, this is a revolution, of course, that is sweeping our country now. - The U.

S. was the global superpower and was locked in a Cold War with another empire a world away. So JFK walks into the presidency to find his military and intelligence leaders causing a lot of trouble around the world.

They had become very comfortable with dangerous secrets. They were funding wars, they were overthrowing governments in faraway countries, they were assassinating leaders that threatened American interests, and they were doing most of this totally in secret. By the way, if you wanna know more about those CIA shenanigans, go watch the video where we map all the U.

S. coups. Anyway, JFK walks in and sees this as "too much.

" He wants to reign in these spy and military leaders from what he sees as an abuse of American power. He ended up firing and demoting a bunch of these leaders, a lot of these intel and military guys who were plotting and executing covert operations around the world, and he continued to pursue like his ideal of world peace. He chose diplomacy over violence.

When nuclear-armed missiles were found in Cuba, he slowed down the momentum towards a full-scale presence in Vietnam and he shut down several of these covert operations that were being planned by the leaders around him. This caused great tension between JFK and America's military and spy leadership. All of this context is important when we look back on that day in November 1963.

- [Newsman] Friday morning, 11:37, the President's jet lands at the Dallas Airport. (typewriter keyboard clacking) (tense suspenseful music) - [Johnny] President Kennedy and the Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson arrived to Dallas for a speech that the President was to give.

He got in this open-top limousine with his wife, Jackie, and the Texas governor, John Connally, along with his wife, Nellie. They rode through these streets, downtown Dallas lined with cheering spectators, and then gunshots rang out. (gunshot fires) - [Newsman] Kennedy apparently shot in head.

Blood was on his head. - [Johnny] The shots hit the President in the neck and head, also wounding Governor Connally. The President was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

- And very often, you'll find a zipper hidden in the arm. - Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath, but President Kennedy and Governor John Connally have been cut down by assassins' bullets in downtown Dallas.

The President has rushed to Parkland Hospital. (tense suspenseful music) (tense suspenseful music) (typewriter keyboard clacking) - [Johnny] Within hours of the assassination, the prime suspect became this 24-year-old former Marine, a self-declared communist who had renounced his American citizenship and moved to the Soviet Union, where he then fell disenchanted with life in Russia and move back to the U. S.

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

While on the run, he shot and killed a Dallas police officer before hiding in a movie theater and then eventually being arrested at around 2:15 PM that day. - I didn't shoot anybody, no, Sir. - There was to be a trial, and Oswald planned to plead not guilty, claiming the whole thing was actually a setup.

- I'm just a patsy. - Patsy, which is like an old-timey term for like the fall guy, the one who was setup. That same day, the vice president, Lyndon B.

Johnson, was rushed back to the presidential plane and sworn in as the new president of the United States before taking off and heading back to Washington. At the same time, the FBI, the top investigatory body in our country, descends onto Dallas. And very quickly, the director of the FBI, J.

Edgar Hoover, who's a big part of the story, he comes to a conclusion as to what happened. This is before any investigation had really gone forth. And Hoover decides that Oswald absolutely was the one who did it.

He was a communist sympathizer, he was a frustrated misfit, and crucially, he acted alone. There was no one else. Here's a phone call between Hoover and the new president, LBJ.

- [J. Edgar] There's no question but that he is the man now. The fingerprints and things we have.

- I'd like some legal representation, but you, police officers, have not allowed me to have any. - But luckily, we have a justice system and we would find what the facts actually say. Oswald was going to stand trial where the evidence could be thoroughly examined, where the country could see for themselves who actually shot their President and get closure on this horrifying event, where whoever did it could actually be brought to justice.

But that never happened. Two days after the assassination, while Oswald was being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail, a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby jumped out in front of the crowd of police officers and news reporters and shot Oswald. (gunshot fires) He was quickly rushed to the hospital where he died soon after, the same hospital where President Kennedy had died just 48 hours earlier.

- Lee Oswald has been shot. - I think he got what he deserved, if he's the one that did it. - It is difficult to say how long it will take for the full realization of what happened to really sink in.

- With Oswald dead, there could be no trial, no real sense of justice. This left the government investigators, the FBI mostly, with the opportunity to really own the narrative of what happened. The very next day, the Deputy Attorney General sends a memo to the White House stressing that the public must be satisfied with this explanation that Oswald acted alone.

He didn't have co-conspirators that were still at large. This had to be the story, and I'll explain why in a sec. This memo also included some wisdom and kind of a foreshadow of what was gonna happen over the next several decades where the memo urges the White House to release as much information as possible to the public so as to avoid public speculation.

Just remember that advice, "Release the information to avoid public speculation. " It's kinda the most important part of the story. We have these recently released phone recordings between the FBI director, J.

Edgar Hoover, and the new president, LBJ, and we see in this phone call that the FBI actually didn't want a thorough investigation. - [Lyndon] I think it would be very, very bad to have a rash of investigations. - [J.

Edgar] It'd be a three-ring circus. - [Lyndon] Well, the only way to stop them is probably to appoint a high level one to evaluate your report. I can select out of the government, and I could tell the House and Senate not to go ahead with the investigation.

- [J. Edgar] Yes. - LBJ creates this group called the Warren Commission, and you can see in these phone calls, he was asking the FBI director who should be on the Commission.

- [Lyndon] What do you think about Allen Dulles? - [J. Edgar] I think he would be a good man.

- [Johnny] Wait, did you catch that? Allen Dulles, he was the former director of the CIA. He's one of the guys that JFK fired after he tried to overthrow the Cuban government.

And now, he's about to be appointed to the committee investigating Kennedy's assassination. This did nothing to instill trust in the Commission. - The new president appointed a Commission of seven prominent Americans to investigate the whole affair.

- [Lyndon] The Special Commission will have before it all the evidence uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and all the information available to any agencies of the Federal Government. - The Warren Commission was given just 10 months to investigate this situation using the evidence that was mostly provided to them by the FBI. They produced this report, which essentially confirms the conclusion that J.

Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, had come to in the hours and days following the assassination, that on November 22nd, the shots fired that killed the President and wounded the Governor were fired by one guy, Lee Harvey Oswald. The report stresses that he acted alone. They say it very definitively.

He nor the person who killed him two days later, Jack Ruby, were a part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign. All of the shots came solely from the sixth floor of this building, and crucially, there were only three shots fired. Three bullets.

- [Lyndon] How many, how many, how many shots were fired? - [J. Edgar] Three.

- [Lyndon] Any of them fired at me? - [J. Edgar] No.

- [Lyndon] All three to the President? - [J. Edgar] All three to the President, and we have them.

- [Johnny] The report says that the first bullet likely missed the car completely, but that the second one did something very interesting. It first hit the president in the back and then exited his chest. It then entered through the governor's back, went through his rib, and then exited through his chest, but it wasn't done yet.

It then entered his wrist, shattering the wrist bone, and then exited the wrist and went partially into the governor's leg. Whoa, okay. It's quite the journey for one bullet.

Oh, and the bullet in question, which just apparently made seven wounds, supposedly looked like this, which some ballistic experts have said looks a little too pristine for a bullet that allegedly just went through two human bodies. And then, of course, the third bullet, according to the Warren Commission, was the one that delivered the fatal headshot to the President. This was the explanation that the Warren Commission came up with to explain all of the wounds that were found on the victims.

All of this damage had to be done with just three bullets, and why just three bullets? Again, ask J. Edgar Hoover right after the assassination.

- [J. Edgar] On that floor, we found the three empty shells that had been fired. - They only found three shells up on that sixth floor.

So if all of this damage was done with more than three bullets, that would mean that there had to be more than one shooter. A conspiracy. But there couldn't be a conspiracy.

Hoover had adopted this line of thinking right after the assassination, this assumption that it was just one guy, and that line of thinking endured into the Warren Commission, a commission that Hoover himself helped the President assemble. In the end, the Commission used a lot of cherry-picked evidence provided to them by the FBI that supported their already-drawn conclusions. And in the process, they turned any focus away from exploring all of the possibilities, including the possibility of a conspiracy.

The report focuses almost entirely on one guy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and his three bullets. - Who killed John F. Kennedy?

The Commission answers unequivocally, "Lee Harvey Oswald. " Was Oswald a member of a conspiracy? The Commission answers, "He acted alone.

" - They ignored witnesses that contradicted their stories. They ignored or modified the signed reports from surgeons and doctors who worked with President Kennedy immediately after he arrived to the hospital that said that the wounds in the President's neck-chest area looked like they came in from the front, meaning not from this building that was behind the President. In other words, the FBI and the Warren Commission ignored the advice from that memo that admonished the government to release all of the facts.

In my mind, this was the biggest mistake and the root of all the conspiracy theories that exists today. The question I had in all of this is, why? Why not do a proper investigation that explores the possibility that this was done by a group of conspirators instead of just one guy?

For me, the answer to this question has a lot to do with the greatest fears that the American government and people were facing in the early 1960s. (tense suspenseful music) (typewriter keyboard clacking) First, we have to remember that 1960s America was right in the heart of the Cold War, a time of constant vigilance of fear of nuclear apocalypse, of extreme tension between these two superpowers. If this assassination was seen as an attempt to topple the government.

Or even worse, if it had been organized by the Soviet Union or its fellow communist regime in Cuba, that would create a sense of panic among the American public. It would be a very different situation than a 24-year-old communist sympathizer acting alone. A believed conspiracy would also create pressure from the American public to strike back, which could lead to an escalation with another nuclear-armed nation.

Oh, and the CIA also had an incentive to keep an investigation from being too widespread. At the time, they were secretly conducting all of these operations to assassinate Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro. This was a big deal and it was a big secret at the time.

Any deep investigation into possible conspiracy with Cuba might reveal that the CIA is trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, which would not be good for the CIA. So one way to read all of this, the memos, the rushed conclusion, the emphasis on Oswald acting alone, the need for there to only be three bullets, you can see this as a bunch of government officials scrambling to keep the American public calm to make sure that pandemonium doesn't break out all while reducing the possibility of geopolitical escalation with the Soviet Union. You can see this in some of these phone calls where the new president is deeply worried about keeping the American people united around a simplified narrative of what happened.

He's worried that if alternative theories get out, it could threaten our entire system. So their tactic for doing this was to hijack the narrative to suppress and influence the investigation and make it very simple, Oswald did it. That's it.

Here's the problem though. Eventually, people will do the math and realize that the government has been keeping the full picture from them, and that's exactly what happens next. (tense suspenseful music) (typewriter keyboard clacking) So the Warren Commission files its report with the official story of what happened, but soon after they do so, members of the Warren Commission themselves come out and say like they don't actually believe the story that the Warren Commission just put out, especially when it comes to the key assertion that one bullet was responsible for causing seven wounds.

- I could not convince myself that the same bullet struck both of them. - [Interviewer] You mean that you, yourself, weren't convinced about the single-bullet theory? - No, I wasn't convinced.

- [Johnny] Governor Connally, the one who was sitting in front of JFK and the one who was supposedly shot by that one single bullet, he disagreed with the story. - I understand there's some question in the minds of the experts about whether or not we could both have been hit by the same bullet. I just don't happen to believe that.

- Even the new president, LBJ, wasn't totally convinced. I mean, he was kind of secretive about it, but he eventually did come out and tell a reporter from the Atlantic that he thought that this was a conspiracy, that it was Cuba retaliating against the U. S.

for all of these CIA attempts to assassinate their leader. This was not good for the Warren Commission and their story. Then, 12 years after the assassination, this full uncut version of a strip of film that shows the assassination of JFK, it finally airs on national TV.

- It's the film shot by the Dallas dress manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder, and it's the execution of President Kennedy. - This was the first time that Americans could see solid visual evidence of this event, but why hadn't it been released earlier? To some, this film contradicted the official account from the Warren Commission and it sparked this new demand for real answers from a government that kept behaving like it was hiding something.

All of this is coinciding with a time in American history where Americans are losing faith in the Federal Government. You just see this massive like nosedive. All of the CIA's covert operations are starting to come to light, the country is mired in this endless war in Vietnam, the President's people were just found spying on their political opponents in a hotel in D.

C. Like, the government has not earned our trust at this point, so people are like, "It wouldn't be a far stretch that the government was also behind the assassination of JFK. " This was furthered by the suspicious assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

- Dr Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. - This was all too much and the people wanted answers. So in a shining moment of redemption of our democracy, Congress responded by forming a committee that reopened the investigations into these two assassinations, JFK and MLK.

This committee did a real investigation. They actually were earnest about this and they confirmed what a lot of Americans were already feeling, which is that the Warren Commission's investigation didn't sufficiently look into the possibilities of a conspiracy. They say it point blank.

They were way too fixated on their assumptions that it had to be this lone gunman that did it and that their conclusions were way too definitive, and then they specifically call out the FBI and the CIA for withholding information from the investigation. One FBI agent even testified that he was ordered by his superiors to destroy evidence. In this case, a letter that Oswald had written to the FBI.

- And he handed it to me and he said, "Oswald's dead now. There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this.

" - Why was the FBI asking its agents to destroy evidence? The committee concluded that it was a "high probability that it was two gunmen that fired at JFK and that it was probably a conspiracy. " That's what it says.

But they stopped short of trying to determine who that other gunman was or who had organized the conspiracy. And then they once again make the recommendation that all of the information on this topic be made public. - Isn't it time for the American people to, at least, know what happened at 12:30 PM in Dallas, Texas on November 22nd, 1963?

- Quick caveat, the committee's conclusion that the assassination was probably a conspiracy relied heavily on one piece of evidence, which was the sound recording from that day where you can hear gunshots and you hear more than three, and it kind of inferred that there were like multiple shooters. This evidence was later challenged and kind of debunked by the FBI, but also a different research facility that basically said, "This sound recording wasn't even gunshots. It wasn't even recorded during the time of the assassination.

" But to me, the whole conspiracy thing was not actually the most important part of this committee's report. The most important part was that they confirmed that the Warren Commission had been cherry-picking evidence and hiding stuff from the American people. After the Congressional Committee confirmed to the American people that the FBI and the CIA had been hiding evidence, the conspiracy theories rose up once again culminating in this movie in the early '90s that paints an alternative picture of what could have happened here, a shadowy government conspiracy to kill the President, or at least a conspiracy to cover up the real story.

- Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the mafia, keeps them guessing like some kind of parlor game, prevents them from asking the most important question, why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited?

Who has the power to cover it up? - The film was largely conjecture, kind of based on some elements of truth, and some might argue that it was irresponsibly misleading to, like, show the American public like, "Hey, the government killed the President. " But hey, in a world where the government isn't being clear and forthright to the American people, this film felt like a response.

Maybe the government was hiding the truth, maybe the government did do it, or maybe they're just covering something up. We don't know because they haven't released information. This was a popular movie and people latched onto the theories presented in this film.

- The notion that there were more than one set of shooters the way that it's presented physically in this movie is highly convincing. - Public pressure got so intense that Congress finally decided to do what they should have done in the '60s, which is force all of these agencies to release all of the information. So in 1992, Congress passes this law that would lay the foundation for releasing all of the documents related to the assassination by October 2017.

That was the deadline. They assembled a committee and gave them several years to go through all of the documents and reexamine the official account and prepare these documents for release to the public. We actually talked to the chairman of that committee.

- I was nominated by President Clinton to chair the Assassination Records Review Board. - In the process of going over all of this documentation, this review board found some more inconsistencies and discrepancies and instances of potential cover-up, like the autopsy. There's an entire video I could make about just the autopsy and the missing brain and all of this, but the crux of it is that what the doctors and surgeons saw moments after the President was shot.

They recorded and they, like, wrote down, but then what the official autopsy record actually looked like when it was released was something very different. The way the wounds were described, where the wounds were, what the brain looked like, all of this stuff had been changed or modified. The photos themselves had potentially been changed, and then the brain itself like literally went missing.

It's like unaccounted for. So anyway, that's an entire rabbit hole that you can go down if you want to. Releasing all these records also revealed that the CIA and FBI had been keeping tabs on Oswald's whereabouts, which maybe makes sense because he was like a Soviet sympathizer, but like, why didn't we know that before?

We learned that the Secret Service had destroyed documents, the original motorcade route sheets that they had, the surveillance tapes from that day. They had destroyed them. - Now, we found those documents in the hands of another agency, so ultimately there was no harm.

- Judge Tunheim said that, yes, they got a lot of documents, but a lot of stuff was still missing. Like, there was one guy at the CIA who took control of the investigation a couple weeks after the assassination, and all of his records are just unaccounted for. - Now, did he destroy them all?

Maybe, I don't know. There's no real record of that, so you still have that previously destroyed issue. - In total, they finally released 5 million documents by 2017, basically everything except for a few thousand documents that the CIA still refuses to release.

Why? Guys, come on. You can find this whole trove of JFK documents on the National Archives' website.

We'll put a link in the description. Okay, but here's the craziest part of all of this. Even after 5 million documents were released to the American public, to a public that was like hungry for like conspiracy, still, there is no solid-smoking gun evidence in any of this that points to a conspiracy, that points to anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald as the person who assassinated the President by himself, acting on his own.

Now, the evidence may exist somewhere, but it's been destroyed or whatever. The point is, the government could have released these 5 million documents in the '60s. Like, they could have done this back when people wanted it, back when they should have, and it wouldn't have changed their official story and it would've satiated an American public that was skeptical of their government.

At this point though, I think it's too late. The feeling that the government was hiding something has now sunk deep into the American psyche. We all kind of are like, "The JFK assassination, yes, something was up there.

" I'm not really sure they're ever gonna regain our trust on this one because of how much hiding of information there was throughout all of these decades. So on the internet, all around, from people who are actually pretty credible, you have alternative explanations that abound. Maybe it was LBJ who planned it so that he could be president.

Or what I believe is perhaps the most feasible theory, which is that some rogue faction in the CIA wanted to take out JFK because JFK was against what the CIA was up to. He was shutting down their covert operations. And then there's, of course, the idea that Cuba did it.

I mean, that's what LBJ, the president after JFK, thought. Like, he was like, "It was probably Cuba because we've been trying to assassinate their leader. " The point is that because of the information vacuum left by the CIA and the FBI holding back evidence from the American people, people started to look at the evidence they did have and grasp at any evidence they could find for conspiracy.

They started connecting the dots of the witnesses who met mysterious or suspicious deaths. Many theorists will fixate on this mysterious man holding an umbrella in this video on a sunny day, maybe giving the signal to a second shooter? It's all very tantalizing, and some of it is actually very valid as like leads for further investigation.

But despite a lot of really fishy stuff, I have not seen any solid evidence that proves an alternative story to the one that was told to us back in the '60s that Lee Harvey Oswald was the guy who did it and he acted alone. I think it's very plausible that there could be some conspiracy. I think we will never know because we simply don't have the evidence.

One thing I do know for certain though is that the moment this investigation turned into an effort to stifle information and influence the facts towards one conclusion, it laid the foundation for the public to turn this into a cesspool of speculation. Again, I keep going back to that feeling of being lied to by your government. It's very potent.

It sticks with you. It creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories of all kinds to sprout. Because when you feel like you're being lied to by your own democracy, by your own leaders, no matter the reason or justification, it makes you feel like you're on your own, like no one's got your back, and that you are the one who needs to find the real truth.

And to me, it's that space that the most enduring conspiracy theories find their footing. (tense suspenseful music) - Have you ever committed any act of violence in your life? - No.