Over 60 years later, we're still obsessed with John F. Kennedy's assassination, and with good reason. Here are just some of the bizarre facts that have us still wondering what really happened in Dallas that day.
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00:00Over 60 years later, we're still obsessed with John F. Kennedy's assassination, and
00:04with good reason. Here are just some of the bizarre facts that have us still wondering
00:07what really happened in Dallas that day.
00:10When historians call Lee Harvey Oswald enigmatic, they're severely underplaying just how mysterious
00:14he was. There's a lot we don't know about the 20th century's most infamous assassin.
00:18We don't know why he did it, and we don't know why he spent the weeks before the assassination
00:22hanging out in Mexico City.
00:23As Professor T. Jeremy Gunn put it to NPR, back then, the city was, quote, the spy capital
00:28of the Western Hemisphere. Cuban agents, Soviet moles, and CIA operatives all rubbed
00:32shoulders there, and Oswald was among them raises all sorts of questions.
00:36It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!
00:39We do know Oswald used his time in Mexico to try and secure a Soviet visa. We don't
00:43know why the records of this are all screwed up. The day he visited the Soviet embassy
00:46just happens to be the day the CIA's camera wasn't working, so we have no pictures.
00:50We once had a recording of a tapped phone call from a guy claiming to be Oswald. A controversial
00:55former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover decided it wasn't Oswald's voice, so the tape vanished.
01:00That's before we get on to the random guys Oswald was with. According to Politico, CIA
01:04informer saw Oswald with two young Americans at a party in the city, who still haven't
01:08established their identities. All we know is that they spent a few days hanging out
01:11with a soon-to-be presidential assassin, and then vanished forever.
01:15One of the spies in Mexico City at the time of Oswald's visit was June or Jerry Cobb,
01:19an Oklahoma girl who turned pro-Castro revolutionary before becoming disgusted with Cuba and turning
01:24into a CIA spy. Cobb was a valuable intelligence asset. Her claims were usually taken seriously,
01:29so when she followed up Kennedy's assassination by telling her CIA handlers Oswald had been
01:33seen at a Mexico City party where people joked about killing JFK, you better believe the
01:37feds listened.
01:38The story comes via Politico, and we should say here that its specifics remain shrouded
01:42in mystery. Cobb's file is still under lock and key for security reasons, so Politico's
01:47reporting comes only from related CIA and FBI files. Still, it's fascinating reading.
01:52Cuban playwright Elena Garro reported the party to Cobb, saying it was a meeting place
01:56for Cuban diplomats. Some were even joking about how useful it'd be if Kennedy was killed.
02:01Garro's information was so shocking that the FBI interviewed her in 1964. But Cobb's intel
02:06was disparaged by the CIA, and no follow-up action seems to have been taken. No evidence
02:10connecting the assassination to Cuba or the Soviets has ever surfaced, even after the
02:14opening of the KGB files. Still, it does make you wonder what exactly happened at that party
02:18and just what Oswald was doing there.
02:21Perhaps the strangest thing about Oswald is that he was under heavy surveillance by
02:25U.S. intelligence agencies after defecting from and returning to the U.S. So how was
02:29he not stopped? On October 16, 1959, he arrived in Moscow and wrote to the Soviet authorities,
02:35renouncing his American citizenship. Then, when the Kremlin rejected his overtures, Oswald
02:39tried to kill himself. That was enough to grant him a temporary stay in the USSR. The
02:43KGB shipped him off to Minsk to work in a radio factory.
02:46According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Summers, Oswald later claimed he'd
02:50offered the Soviets information on America's U-2 spy planes.
02:52No, sir, I am not a communist. I have studied Marxist philosophy, yes sir, and also other
02:57philosophers.
02:58Flash forward to June 1962, and Oswald was back in the States, this time with a Soviet
03:02wife and newborn daughter. Given his history, you'd probably expect his return to be announced
03:06by dozens of men in dark glasses bundling him out of the airport and into a mobile interrogation
03:11chamber. Yet, the CIA never questioned him.
03:14The FBI did question him twice after his return, and once again on August 10, 1963, after he
03:19was arrested for disturbing the peace by handing out pro-Castro flyers. But for whatever reason,
03:24a defector was given free reign to waltz around the country until he shot the president.
03:29In the video of Ronald Reagan being shot, the first shot goes off, and within a split
03:33second, the president has been whisked away while John Hinckley Jr. vanishes beneath a
03:36sea of bodies. Now compare the Kennedy assassination. The first bullet hits JFK in the throat, and
03:41the Secret Service does nothing. The second bullet is the headshot that killed Kennedy.
03:45Five seconds pass between the two shots. A high-speed Reagan-style response could have
03:49saved the president.
03:50Driver William Greer didn't take evasive action. Paul Landis, following the Kennedy car, didn't
03:55jump on board and shield the president with his body. The Secret Service guy you see jumping
03:58onto the car in the assassination footage? That's Clint Hill, part of the First Lady's
04:02detail, fulfilling his duty to protect Jackie.
04:04Interviews with Secret Service personnel by Vanity Fair talk about a macho culture where
04:08members would refuse food and sleep and spend every night getting crazy drunk. While a no-sleep
04:12hangover would explain their inaction, it doesn't explain other weird screw-ups, like
04:16why the running boards on JFK's car were retracted, meaning there was no one to protect the president
04:21if something happened. Then something happened.
04:23John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 o'clock Central Standard Time today here in Dallas.
04:33Following Kennedy's assassination, officials tried to trace all possible witnesses.
04:36It was just right by us when it all happened, just right in front of us.
04:41Many were known only by nicknames, like Umbrella Man, The Three Tramps, or Badge Man. It took
04:45until the 1990s to track most down, or, in the case of Badge Man, prove they probably
04:50didn't exist. And the hunt isn't over. We still have no idea who the Babushka Lady was.
04:54Known for her Russian-style headscarf, the Babushka Lady was on Dealey Plaza filming
04:58the assassination. A piece of film would be of unimaginable historical importance. People
05:03have been searching for her for decades. In 1970, a woman named Beverly Oliver surfaced,
05:07claiming to be the mystery woman. But she said she knew who really killed Martin Luther
05:10King Jr., and claimed she was recording JFK's death with a camera that hadn't been invented
05:15yet, so serious historians tend to dismiss her. That means there's someone out there
05:18with unseen footage of a major historical event who has never turned herself in. So
05:22if you're a headscarf-loving woman who was in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, your
05:27local FBI office would love to hear from you.
05:30After JFK's death, things only got weirder. The body was taken to Dallas Parkland Memorial
05:34Hospital, but it barely got through the doors before a fight broke out over who got to
05:38perform the autopsy. The local coroner was Earl Rose. Since Kennedy was killed in Texas,
05:43he felt it was a state crime, that Texas law applied, and that he was responsible for the
05:47post-mortem. According to the LA Times, however, the Secret Service and Jackie Kennedy disagreed.
05:52Things quickly got ugly.
05:53I'm the medical examiner. This is a homicide case. The deceased can't leave until there's
05:59been an autopsy.
06:00When Rose tried to physically block the Secret Service from the body, a heated argument broke
06:03out. At some point, Kennedy's details simply grabbed the body. According to some accounts,
06:07guns were drawn. Either way, the outcome was the same. Kennedy's remains were transported
06:11to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Likely as a result of this dispute, there's no longer
06:16any ambiguity. A 1965 code makes it clear that attempting to assassinate the commander-in-chief
06:21is a federal crime.
06:23Given its importance, you might expect JFK's autopsy was done with the utmost diligence.
06:27But not only were parts of the autopsy done in a strange way, a whole lot of crazy issues
06:31surfaced later.
06:32When you're autopsying a body, there are specific procedures you should follow. Removing and
06:36weighing the organs is one — something autopsy doctor James Joseph Humes admitted in 1996
06:41hadn't been done. This pales in comparison to the other things Humes didn't do. He didn't
06:45preserve the original JFK autopsy report. He made a handwritten copy, then burned the
06:49original. Humes claimed he wanted to stop the blood-stained report from becoming a source
06:53of morbid fascination. On the other hand, he failed to destroy at least one other blood-stained
06:57document.
06:59Then there are the autopsy photos. The ones in the National Archive are low-quality and
07:10don't show important details like the number of bullet wounds. When Professor Gunn showed
07:14them to the woman who developed them, Sandra Spencer, as part of his work on the 1992 Assassination
07:18Records Review Board, she said they didn't look like the images she remembered processing.
07:23She said that the photographs that she developed had a large, massive exit wound in the back
07:28of the head."
07:29Next, Gunn tried to match them to photos printed by Spencer's lab shortly before the assassination.
07:33The photo paper was completely different, suggesting they came from a different printing
07:37session.
07:38It sometimes seems the only thing that could shed more light on what happened in Dealey
07:41Plaza that day is a deathbed confession from a professional assassin. Well, buckle up,
07:46because that deathbed confession exists.
07:48Many strange things were happening, and your Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with them."
07:52In 1966, Herminio Diaz-Garcia, a hitman for the Cuban mafia, died during a raid on a prison.
07:59Before he expired, he told fellow mobster Tony Cuesta he'd been responsible for the
08:02death of the U.S. president. That's the story investigative journalist Anthony Summers tells
08:06in his book on the assassination, Not in Your Lifetime.
08:09In 2007, Summers and Robert Blakey, a former chief counsel to the House Select Committee
08:13on Assassinations, interviewed Cuban exile Ronaldo MartÃnez Gómez, who also spoke with
08:17The Telegraph in 2013. Gómez said he'd shared a cell with Cuesta, who told him about Diaz's
08:22confession. In fact, Diaz was in the United States on November 23, 1963, and had previously
08:28carried out 20 political assassinations. Of course, this is just one man's word, and hitmen
08:32tend to lie, but there are other bizarre Cuban connections to JFK's murder.
08:37Also in 2007, former Kennedy Detail Secret Serviceman Abraham Bolden told ABC about a
08:41tip-off the service received ahead of JFK's aborted trip to Chicago on November 2, 1963.
08:47Two Cuban men with rifles were spotted in a rented room along the motorcade route, but
08:51the surveillance operation against them was bungled, and the potential assassins vanished.
08:55Kennedy was a beloved president, while Sam Giancana was a violent mobster who once worked
09:00for Al Capone.
09:01I declined to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.
09:04Yet if you were to read books on the lives of both Kennedy and Giancana, you'd find they
09:07keep propping up in each other's stories. The coincidences add fuel to the rumors that
09:11the mafia killed Kennedy for riding hard on them. Giancana had ties to JFK's dad, Joseph
09:16P. Kennedy, from Prohibition.
09:17The old man and Kennedy was a very close friend of Giancana's. They were in business together
09:22in the old days, in the bootlegging business.
09:24But the ties may have gone deeper. In 1997, reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The
09:29Dark Side of Camelot that Joe Kennedy asked Giancana to help his son win the 1960 election.
09:34Then there's Frank Sinatra, who was friends with both JFK and Giancana. Frank's daughter
09:38Tina later claimed that her father asked Giancana to lean on the unions to help JFK win the
09:42Democratic primaries. JFK and Giancana also shared a mistress, Judith Campbell Exner,
09:47who said in 1988 that she arranged secret meetings between them.
09:50I can at this time emphatically state that my relationship with Jack Kennedy was of a
09:56close personal nature.
09:58The strangest part of all may concern not Kennedy's death, but Giancana's. The mob boss
10:02was used by the CIA to attempt a hit on Castro, just before he could testify before the Senate's
10:07church committee about his work with the agency. Giancana himself was assassinated.
10:12There's almost no official record of Oswalt's questioning by Dallas police or the FBI. The
10:16interrogators didn't use a tape recorder and had no stenographers present to take accurate
10:20notes. Records in the interrogation of the 20th century's most notorious assassin come
10:24solely in the form of handwritten notes made by the two interviewers. These notes are rough
10:28and incomplete, offering only the tiniest glimpse inside Oswalt's psyche.
10:32And incredibly, we only have one set of these notes today. And that's because they were
10:36discovered among the personal belongings of former police captain J.W. Fritz in the 1990s,
10:41and anonymously donated.
10:42Did you kill the president?
10:43No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.
10:48Fritz's notes are very clear on one thing. Oswalt repeatedly protested his innocence,
10:53claiming that the images of him posing with the rifle used to kill Kennedy were faked.
10:56Conspiracy implications aside, this at least suggests Oswalt's motive wasn't fame or notoriety.
11:02In the decades since Kennedy's death, a whole bunch of records and important documents have
11:06The Mary Farrell Foundation maintains an online database regarding the missing records. While
11:11many of the Foundation's conspiracy theory claims are unsupported, the missing records
11:14are well-catalogued. Among those vanished documents are a note written by Oswalt and
11:18sent to the FBI, an Army intelligence file on Oswalt, and Secret Service records relating
11:23to a trip JFK nearly took to Chicago in November 1963.
11:26In addition, there's some evidence the Marine Corps, of which Oswalt had been a member, launched
11:31its own investigation after the assassination, but no documents from it have ever surfaced.
11:36Perhaps even weirder is the story of the missing page from Oswalt's notebook, reported in The
11:40L.A. Times. Historian and journalist James Reston, Jr. claims Secret Service agent Mike
11:44Howard checked Oswalt's apartment after the assassination and found a notebook with a
11:48page headed,
11:49"...I will kill."
11:50Underneath were the names of an FBI agent, a general, and Richard Nixon. Texas Governor
11:54John Connolly was also listed, with a dagger drawn through his name.
11:57Reston views this as more evidence that Oswalt meant to kill Connolly, who was riding in
12:01JFK's car and was badly injured in the assassination. Whether his interpretation is correct or not,
12:06that's a moot point. The page was torn out after Howard handed the book over and has
12:09been missing ever since.
12:11President Kennedy's brain is missing. In 1966, it was revealed to have vanished from a secure
12:16room at the National Archives. If you think that's weird, just wait. Historian James L.
12:20Swanson wrote in his book, End of Days, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, that he
12:24believed the thief was JFK's brother, Robert F. Kennedy.
12:27After Kennedy's autopsy, his brain was placed in a stainless steel container. It was kept
12:31along with several samples of brain tissue, first by the Secret Service, then at the National
12:35Archives. Being both important and utterly morbid, its time at the archives was spent
12:39under the watchful eye of JFK's former secretary. That makes its disappearance all the more
12:43mystifying.
12:44In October 1966, someone went looking for the brain and found it and all the tissue
12:49samples had vanished. The attorney general immediately ordered an investigation. Half
12:53a century later, we're still waiting for it to turn up. So where does RFK fit in?
12:58Swanson's theory is that Kennedy's brother stole his brain to cover up the massive stew
13:01of drugs the president was taking.
13:03Had the American public known just how sick Jack Kennedy was, he probably could not have
13:08been a presidential candidate.
13:10According to The Telegraph, JFK was knocking back codeine, demerol, and methadone for back
13:14pain, along with other pills for insomnia and anxiety.
13:18In July 2017, a handful of new files on JFK's death were released to the public. This was
13:22in accordance with a 1992 law that all records of the assassination had to be declassified
13:27by October 26, 2017. While most of the new files were little more than duplicates of
13:32already public material, they did contain one strange new nugget of information.
13:36From the Warren Commission onwards, the CIA publicly embraced the lone gunman theory that
13:40Oswald acted alone. But the new documents revealed that, by the mid-1970s, the CIA no
13:45longer believed this. Internally, the agency began to consider JFK's death part of a possible
13:50conspiracy, even as they continued to publicly support the theory that Oswald acted alone.
13:54I know what it is to kill someone. You don't bounce and come this way. When you bounce
14:00and come this way, you got hit in the front.
14:03What the CIA actually believed happened is vague and sometimes contradictory. Some agents
14:07seem to have started taking the Soviets in Cuba seriously as suspects. Others seem to
14:11have worried the killing was inadvertently related to their own work. This theory went
14:15that Oswald read about CIA assassination attempts on Castro and killed Kennedy in revenge. As
14:19Politico notes,
14:21If that proved true, it would have raised a terrible question for the CIA. Was it possible
14:24that JFK's assassination was blowback for the spy agency's plots to kill Castro?
14:29What this indicates, and this was the judgment of the committee, is that our own people aren't
14:33as efficient as we might think they ought to be.
14:36Whatever was really happening inside the agency, the CIA kept its concern private, even from
14:41other government agencies. Why they may have felt the need to do so is just one more oddity
14:45to add to the unexplained aspects of the JFK assassination.
14:49After the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB files were briefly opened to researchers.
14:53Among them was a file that detailed Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the USSR. Before the files
14:58were closed again, Russian paper Izvestia reported on some of its contents in 1991.
15:03Rather than add clarity, the reports only further muddied the waters.
15:07As a defector, Oswald was of considerable interest to the KGB. Yet the files reveal
15:11the Kremlin effectively thought he was useless. In the late 1950s, Oswald decamped to the
15:16Soviet Union, and the secretive government security office, the KGB, kept an eye on him.
15:20It was the opinion of the KGB that Oswald lacked the psychological profile that would
15:24have made him a useful asset. One especially noteworthy observation is that apparently,
15:29Oswald was a pretty lousy shot.