January 28, 2024 • 43 mins
Rob Reiner first came to fame as a two-time Emmy Award winning actor on the landmark television series All in the Family. He went on to become an acclaimed director of some of the most popular and influential motion pictures. His work ranges from the satire, This Is Spinal Tap to dramas like Stand By Me, Misery, A Few Good Men, and Ghosts of Mississippi to romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally, and The American President, to the enduring classic, The Princess Bride. He’s joining Newt to discuss his new 10-part podcast, Who Killed JFK? In commemoration of the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's tragic assassination, Reiner and journalist Soledad O’Brien interview CIA officials, medical experts, Pulitzer-prize winning journalists, eyewitnesses and a former Secret Service agent who, in 2023, came forward with groundbreaking new evidence.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of Nuts World. Rob Reiner first came
to fame as a two time Emmy Award winning actor
on the Landmark television series All in the Family. He
went on to become an acclaimed director of some of
the most popular and influential motion pictures. His work ranges
from satire This Is Spinal Tap, which is one of
(00:26):
my favorites, to dramas like stand By Me, Misery, A
Few Good Men and Ghost of Mississippi, to romantic comedies
like When Harry Met Sally and the American President, to
the enduring classic The Princess Bride. His now twenty films
also include The Bucket List, Flipped, LBJ starring Woody Harrelson,
(00:47):
and most recently Shock and Awe, which exposed the lies
that led to the US invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Rob, along with his.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Wife Michelle and Matthew George, continue to run Castle Rock
Entertainment and film production company. He's joining me today to
discuss his new ten part podcast entitled Who Killed JFK
In commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of President John F.
Kennedy's tragic assassination. Reiner and journalist Soledad O'Brien interview CIA officials,
(01:20):
medical experts, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, eyewitnesses, and a former
Secret Service agent who in twenty twenty three came forward
with groundbreaking new evidence. They also discussed their own theories
of who killed JFK, how that question has shaped America,
and why it matters that sixty years later we're still
(01:41):
asking the question. Rob. Welcome and thank you for joining
me on Newtsworld.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Thanks for having me Newton.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
This is great and I have to say when I
learned that, I think it's correct that when Harry met Sally,
the woman in the background who says I'll take whichever
she has is I think your mother.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yes, yes, my mother, and she took her place in
the pantheon of most quoted lines in movies.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
It's an amazing scene and anybody who hasn't seen it
now you've got to go see it to see what
we're talking about. Let me start with you grew up
with one of the great comedians of all time, a
man who, in someone has invented much of television comedy,
and that's Carl Reiner. He did one hundred and fifty
eight episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, so from
your own background. I mean, were you just sort of
(02:39):
automatically in the entertainment business.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
You know, it seems like I was, because that was
what I was surrounded by my whole life growing up.
I mean, mel Brooks was around, and Norman Lear and
all of these, you know, great comedians and comic writers.
And I've often said that if you look at anything
that you laughed at in the second half of the
(03:03):
twentieth century, it came from my father in the Sid
Caesar Show. You had Neil Simon, and like I said,
mel Brooks and Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart, all these
great writers writing some of the funniest things you ever
can imagine. And that's the atmosphere that I grew up in.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And then when you're superty young, you go to the
Bucks County Playhouse, which was a fairly famous local playhouse
in NewHope, Pennsylvania, and again you're working with people who
become famous.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah. I was an apprentice, you know, I was building scenery,
painting sets and things like that. I wasn't anybody in
those days. But yeah, I mean, you know, merv Griffin
came and did a show, and Alan Ald and Shelley Berman.
All these people came through and it was a great
exposure and a great way. It was my first job.
I guess you would say didn't get paid for it,
(03:53):
but it was my first job in show business.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Well, and I didn't realize that your writing career starts
with his mother's brother's Comedy Hour, and your writing partner
is one of the great comedians of our time, Steve Martin.
I mean, what was it like to interact regularly with Steve?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Well, we were the two youngest. I was twenty one,
Steve was twenty three, So I think they threw us
together because we were the youngest ones. And we wrote
a couple of great sketches and it was fun. Because
we were young. We didn't know Tommy Smothers was always
fighting with the censors. I mean, we were at a
time when there was a lot going on in the world.
We had the Vietnam War, we had the civil rights
(04:28):
movement heating up, and the women's movement, and we wrote
some very cutting edge things, and Tommy always had a
fight with the censors. He was always fighting, and I
didn't understand, why can't we just put this on you know,
why can't we just do this because you're a young kid,
you don't know any different. But Tommy was, and he
just passed away recently too, and you know, I miss
him and Norman Lee or my dad. I was talking
(04:51):
to my friend Albert Brooks and I said, all these
people are dying around me and he said, well.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Move well, you know, and it's fascinating because you are
part of a generation of comedians that years ago, I
read Steve Allen's book The Funny Man, and there's this
whole pattern of comedy and people learning from each other
and sort of grows on itself and it evolves, it does.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
I mean, you take from each other. I mean, you know,
you can't help but be influenced. I mean I was very,
very lucky in that I had two men in my life,
my father obviously and Norman Lear, who were great role models,
and I looked up to them. People always ask me, well,
did they give you advice? And so on. They don't
sit you down and give you advice. The advice they
(05:39):
give is you observe how they live, and that's the
best advice you can get. Is they model how to
be with other people, how to create, how to do
what they do. And that's what I took from both
of them. I learned from my dad how to handle
being famous and you know, dealing with the world. And
I learned from Norman that you can take your fame,
(06:02):
your celebrity and whatever, and you can create things, and
you can also use them for good. You know, if
there's issues that you care about, you can promote them
through your celebrity, and I've fortunately been able to do
that as well.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The great breakthrough in your career, which leads to everything else,
is when you play Meathead on All in the Family,
which was a huge hit and you won two Primetime
Emmy Awards. It's a great role, and of course it's
part of the reason that it's an honor for me
to be interviewing you, because you are so much a
part of my life. How did you end up with
(06:38):
that role?
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Well, you know, it's interesting because normally did two pilots
with ABC and they didn't sell. And I auditioned for
one of those pilots and I didn't get the part.
But then I guess I matured a little bit, I
got a little better as an actor, and he saw
me in some things that I did, and then I
went and auditioned a second time, and this time I
(07:01):
got the part, and oddly enough I auditioned with my
soon to be wife, Penny Marshall, who passed away a
little while ago, and Penny didn't get the part. Sally
Struthers did and the rest, as they say, is history.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Well, and you had Carol O'Connor and Jeans Stable. To me,
the four of you made such a great troop, if
you will, the chemistry seemed amazing.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, the chemistry was incredible, And you know, when you're
making a show like that, and we did eight seasons,
We did over two hundred episodes, and you know, you
spend more time with those people in your TV family
than you do it with your real family, because you're
there for you know, ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day,
(07:44):
and so it becomes a family. And we wore a family.
We loved each other and we supported each other and
it was an incredible experience.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
How much of the chemistry was Norman Lear?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Oh, a lot, a lot. Recently, I was on the
Emmy Awards show program and Sally Struthers and I introduced
the clip package that was about immemoriam the people who
had passed away in the last year, and it started
with Norman Lear. And one thing I said about Norman,
aside from all the great things he did and the
(08:16):
culture he changed by the work he did, was that
I called him it's a Yiddish phrase. I called him
a cook level. It's a Yiddish phrase that means ladle.
It's something that stirs the pot. And that's what Norman did.
He stirred the pot. He always tried to get the
best out of you, and he said, dig into your cls,
find out what you feel and what you believe, and
(08:38):
we'll get that into the scripts. And so he did that.
He was a tremendous catalyst for all the success of
not just All in the Family, but the Jeffersons and
Maud and Good Times and one day at a time,
all the shows that he had. I think he had
like eight primetime shows on at one time, which is astounding.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
It was remarkable. Now you took all that experience, in
that knowledge, and you become a director, starting with a
film I've always liked, which is the heavy metal mockumentary
this is Spinal Tap. First of all, what inspired you
to become a director, And second why that show is
your launch point?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Well, I always wanted to direct, even before I did
All the Family. When I was nineteen, I was at
UCLA and I formed an improvisational group and was called
The Session, and I directed it and acted in it,
and we got a theater on Sunset, and I did
that for a while. I directed plays and Los Angeles,
(09:35):
and so when I got All the Family, it basically
was kind of interrupting in a weird way my directing career,
which is what I always wanted to do. So that
was something I wanted to do from the get go. Now,
Spinal Tap came to be because I was talking to
Harry Sheer, who plays Derek Small's in the film, and
we had an idea to do a film called Roadie
(09:59):
and it was all about the road managers and the
behind the scenes for rock and Roll. Now. In nineteen
seventy eight, Harry and myself and Chris Guest who plays Nigel,
and Michael McKean who plays David sat humans. We did
a TV show called The TV Show of All Things,
and it was a satire of various things on television,
sitcoms and commercials and telethons, all kinds of stuff. And
(10:23):
one of the things we did to take off was
Saturday night. It was called Midnight Special and it was
a rock and roll program that came on Saturday night
and I played wolf Man Jack and we had this
band called Spinal Tap, and this is the first time
they ever appeared, and they did a song called rock
and Roll Nightmare. And during the time we were working
on it, between takes, Harry and Michael and Chris started
(10:45):
ad libbing, you know, as these British rock and roll guys,
and so down the Road we said, hey, you know,
maybe we could do something with these guys. We'll do
a movie about them. And so that eventually Down the
Road became the basis for Spinal Tap.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
In a sense, because Spinal Tap was humor and that
kind of goes out of a lot of your background experience.
But when I think about, for example, A Few Good Men,
that is a long way from humor. That's very different.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, there's some comedy in it, but basically it's a drama.
I mean, it's a serious drama and it's based on
a true story. Actually, Aaron Sorkin's sister was in the
jag Coars during this period, and there was a colonel
who was on this military base in Bontanamo, and he
(11:32):
did get court martialed because he illegally ordered a code
read done on a marine that was under his auspices.
And they had a trial and he eventually left the
Marine Corps, and you know, it was kind of uncomfortable,
and that became the basis for the play A Few
(11:53):
Good Men, which Aaron wrote and was on Broadway and
then we adapted it for the screen.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
No, it's a very very power, powerful movie.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Thanks. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, of all your films, and I have such a
broad range, is there anyone you look back and you
say that's my favorite.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Well, you know, Newt it's like all your children. We
love them all, even the ones who are rotten at times.
But no, I think I don't know if it's my
best film. But the one that means the most to
me is Stand by Me because it was the first
time in my life that I did a film that
(12:28):
really reflected my personality. You know, my father started doing
satire and you know, as you just pointed out, spinal
Tap was a satire. Then I did a small film
called The Sure Thing, which is a romantic comedy about
young people. And my dad had done a number of
romantic comedies. But stand By Me was the first time
I did something that had humor in it. It had nostalgia,
(12:49):
it had melancholy, it had all these elements, and it
was more reflective of my personality. And so when it
became successful, it validated the things I wanted to do,
and I've tried to marry drama and humor in most
of the things I do.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You had an amazing run there because you do stand
by Me in eighty six. You come back with an
iconic film, The Princess Bride in eighty seven, and I
would argue an equally iconic film when Harry met Sally
in eighty nine. I mean you were on a real
role at that point.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, yeah, And when Harry met Sally. There's a good
story about this, which is, not only did my mother
say that line, I'll have what she's having, but I
met my wife, who I will be married to for
thirty five years in May. I met her making that film,
and I changed the ending of the film because I
(13:41):
met her while we were making the film. I had
been single for ten years. After having been married for
ten years, I was now divorced and single. I was
making a mess, a complete mess. Of my dating life.
You know, I was with this one. I broke up.
I couldn't make it work with this one. It was
all that kind of stuff, and that became the basis
for when Harry met Sally. So I didn't see how
(14:02):
I was ever going to be with anybody. So that's
the way it ended initially that they didn't get together,
And when I met Michelle, I said, oh, I see
I could be with somebody, and then then went and
changed the ending.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Which changes the whole movie.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
It's the whole movie, and I think it would not
have been successful. I don't think if the two of
them hadn't gotten together at the end.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
It's a remarkable film. You've done all these amazing things
as an actor, as a director, as a writer, and
(14:47):
then you turn your attention to JFK, which, of course,
for our generation, was one of the moments that shattered
our lives and forced us to confront that there's evil
in the world and that things can happen you can't control.
It's remarkably successful. Who Killed JFK has five and a
half million total downloads, spent weeks at number one on
(15:08):
Apple's Top podcast chart, has been the number one history
podcast for over two months. I mean, you're obviously hit
a home run here, but what led you into doing this?
Because it's a big project.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
You'll appreciate it because if you were alive at that time,
you knew exactly where you were when you heard that news.
Nothing had ever happened like that in modern American history.
A president being gunned down in broad daylight on an
American street. It was just shocking. It was a national trauma.
(15:41):
And I remember I was sixteen at the time. I
was in physics class in high school and a kid
came in whispered in the teacher's ear, and future turned
to us and said, I have some terrible news, and
he told us what had happened, and we were all
sent home from school. And I sat there like everybody else,
(16:01):
and watched television and watched continuously to see what was
going on. And I actually saw, like many many people did.
I watched the man who was accused of killing the president,
Lee Harvey Oswald, shot and killed himself on live television,
and never seen anything like that before, so it was
like shocking. Again. I was only seventeen. I didn't really
(16:25):
understand what had happened, and it wasn't until after the
Warren Commission report came out. I read this book called
Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane, and he questioned the
Warren Commission report. He started talking about things that either
didn't make sense or warrant accurate and all of this,
and I started getting interested in it.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Then.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I was about nineteen, I think at the time, and
I was playing at the Hungry Eye up in San
Francisco with my friend Larry Bishop, and we opened for
Carmen McCrae. And in the smaller room there was a
little room and there was median Mort Sahl, who, for
those of you who don't know who that is, he
was a very famous political satirist. He used to do
(17:07):
political satires. He was a comedian. But this time he
was not talking about it at all. All he talked
about was the Warren Commission Report and that it was
something wrong with it and it didn't make sense and
all this stuff. And that got me even more interested.
So from that point on, for almost sixty years, anytime
a new thing would come out, it was a book
(17:30):
or a new bit of evidence, or something would emerge.
I was fascinated by it. And the reason I did
the podcast is because if you're not following this closely,
you know, something emerges and you go, well, that's interesting,
but what does that have to do with everything else?
How do you put this together? And based on everything
(17:50):
I had read, all the forensics experts I had talked to,
visiting Dealey Plaza many times, going to the school book depository,
going up to the sixth floor, studying that, I started
piecing it together. I went to where Oswald boarding house
where he stayed, and I started piecing it all together
with all the information. I said, I'd like to put
(18:10):
together what I think happened and what I believe happened
on that fateful day and for people who have not
been following it. Intimately put the pieces together so that
people who don't know much about it will get a
sense of it, and people who have been researching it
and studying it for years will maybe learn a little
(18:31):
bit more and put it all together. So that's what
led me to do it. And you know, in the
last six seven years, I ran into a great researcher
named Dick Russell, who wrote a book called The Man
Who Knew Too Much was all about a guy named
Richard K. Snagel who was a CIA asset who worked
for the military, who was a military intelligence guy, and
(18:52):
he knew Lee Harvey Oswald. And I started learning about
people who knew Lee Harvey Oswald, learned about the files
that the CIA kept on Lee RV. Oswell. They have
thousands and thousands of pages of files which have been
released over the years, but in the Warrant Commission report,
there's no mention. There's like saying, we don't really know
(19:13):
Lee Harvey Oswell, we don't know much about him. He
was alone assassin. And then you find out there's thousands
of pages of tracking Lee Harvey Oswald for years, for
four years prior to the assassination. So you start putting
all these pieces together and you learn, You learn what
this one did and what that one did. And we
(19:33):
have eyewitnesses, people who were there that day who will
say very specific things. Listen to the podcast. You're going
to get it all. You're going to hear what happened.
And we don't put anything out there that we can't substantiate.
I mean, we named four shooters. Now, exactly where they
were positioned, we don't know, but we do know, and
(19:56):
this is based on hard evidence. We know that there
were four assassins present in Dallas that day. And here's
something interesting. And I didn't talk about this on the podcast,
but and I don't think John Brennan will mind me
saying this. It's not classified in any way. But I've
become friends with John Brennan over the years, and I
(20:19):
was having dinner with him one night, and I was
dying to ask him what he knew. You know, I'm
so steeped in it, but I didn't. I didn't ask
him because you know, I just felt awkward. And then
you know, at the end of the meal, he said
to me, so, what are you working on these days?
You know, just a casual kind of thing. And I said, well,
you know, I'm working on this idea about the Kennedy assassination.
(20:40):
He says, what do you think about that? And I
started to tell him the things that I thought. And
at one point I said to him, what do you
know about a man named Richard case Nagel? And he
said to me, well, what do you know about Richard
case Nagel? Like that? And I tell him what I know.
You know, the things I knew, which your all documented.
(21:01):
I mean, there are newspaper reports for all this, and
then at one point his wife Cathy says, John, do
you think there's any reason why Rob should not pursue this?
And all he said at the time was no, I
think it's always a good idea to revisit history, That's
all he said. And then two weeks later I got
(21:21):
an email from him saying that there's a man that
he worked with in the CIA. And by the way,
this guy his name is Ralph Mowatt Larson, he's in
the podcast. We interview him for the podcast. This is
a man that John worked with for twenty years. He
had been a Moscow Bureau chief for a while, and
he said he has some similar thoughts to what you
(21:41):
are presenting. Would you like to meet him? So I
went to DC with my wife Michelle, and we met
sat down, had dinner with him, and he did lay
out a similar idea to what we had. Oddly enough,
he named one of the people that he believed was
one of the shooters, and it was one of the
shooters that we had already identified, a fellow named Jack Cannon,
(22:04):
who we talk about in the podcast. But essentially what
he said it had in his mind. It had all
the ear marks and the markings of a rogue CIA
operation and how it was done, and so you know,
it kind of corroborated the way in which I thought
about it. But you have to understand, this is not
(22:25):
a from the top bottom kind of thing. No paper
trail for this. You're not going to say, somebody's gonna
write down, well, we're going to kill a president today,
here's your job, here's your job. You know, it doesn't
work that way. It's done in very clandestine ways. And
we get into how this could happen and the allies
that they had, and we try to approach it like
a crime, and we call it the greatest murder mystery
(22:48):
in American history, and we approach it the way you
would an investigation, which is, who are the suspects, who
had motive, what are the forensics, and then you start
to put it together. And it's obviously it's a circumstantial case,
but if you put the pieces together, you start to
form a picture that's fairly clear.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Well, it's justly because you were so exhaustive about this,
and like you, that was one of the defining moments
of my life. But I have a similar passion about
what exactly happened and I'm pretty convinced that the War
and Commission was a cover up. You make the case
that Texas Governor John Connolly said for his whole life
(23:28):
that he was not hit by the same bullet.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
No, no, he's always said that till the day died.
And we know that that's true because the Warrant Commission
had a real problem. They had a real problem, which
is they said there were only three shots that came
from the sixth floor of the book depository. Now, the
problem they had was that the first shot missed and
(23:54):
it hit a curb and a little piece of concrete
was flicked up, hit a bystander named James Tag in
the cheek and his cheeks started to bleed all of
a sudden. So now they're down to two shots. They
have only got two shots. We know a shot hit
President Kennedy in the head. You can see it on
the Zappruter film. So that's one shot. So that leaves
(24:15):
one bullet left, and that one bullet has to do
a lot of stuff. First of all, the autopsy diagram
show that a bullet entered Kennedy's back about six to
eight inches below his neck. The one they're talking about,
which they call the single bullet theory, by the way,
was developed by Arlen Spector, who was a counsel to
(24:36):
the Warrant Commission at the time. The bullet goes into
Kennedy's back six to eight inches below his neck, then
travels up and comes out his throat, then makes a turn.
This would have had to what happened. Hits Connelly in
the armpit, in the ribs, and then makes another turn,
(24:57):
breaking some of his wristbones. That makes another turn and
goes into his thigh. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. It
makes no sense. And by the way, the bullet that
they said did that winds up as Evidence number three
ninety nine. You can see it. It's in the archives.
It's also in the Warrant Commission report. It's virtually a
(25:19):
pristine bullet. Has a little striations on the tip of it,
but other than that it is pristine. And they say
it wound up on the stretcher of Connolly. And so
this came out during the podcast while we're doing the podcast.
It came out this guy Paul Landis, who was a
Secret Service agent who was in the trail car behind
(25:40):
Kennedy's car, who's on the running board and witnessed the
whole thing. He said, the bullet that hit Kennedy in
the head, he said, brain matter and skull matter was
flying at him, flying in his direction, and he had
a duck to miss all this stuff that was coming
at him. Then when they arrived at Parkland Hospital, he
(26:00):
was in charge of helping missus Kennedy up. He helped
her up, They got the president out, getting him into
the hospital. When he helped her up, he noticed there
was a pool of blood in the backseat of the limo,
and then resting on the head part of the seat
was this bullet. This bullet that became the one that
(26:21):
was in the archives. And he didn't testify at all,
and the Warren Commission, by the way, never asked for it.
Not only his testimony, but no Secret Service testimony was
in the Warrant Commission. So years later he saw this
bullet and he said, Hey, that's my bullet. That's the bullet.
He picked it up because he thought, this is an
important piece of evidence. I don't want it somebody grab
(26:43):
it for a souvenir. He put it in his pocket
and he went into the emergency room and he took
the bullet and he put it by Kennedy's body, thinking that,
you know, they'd find it or whatever. But the point
is that's not a bullet that went through Connelly because
it's there in the backseat of the car. So the
whole thing, it just corroborates the whole idea of the
(27:05):
crazy single bullet theory. But they had to have that
theory otherwise they couldn't pin it all on Oswald. Now
we're not saying there wasn't a shooter up on the
sixth floor. There was. There was, and there were witnesses
who saw a shooter on the sixth floor, but that's
not the whole story. There were other shooters in other positions.
Based on the forensics, we can pretty well place where
(27:28):
those shooters were.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
And you think there were four of them.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Well, I think they're either four or five. We didn't
say five only because we couldn't identify five assassins in
Dallas that day. Most people think they were four to five.
There are some people think only two. But if you
look at the forensics and you study it, it couldn't
have been done in two positions. We say yes, the
(27:53):
school book depository, sixth floor what has become to be
known as the Grassy Knoll where some shots came from.
There's a building behind Houston Street called the dal Text Building,
which easily could have accounted for some of the wounds
from there. And then there's the Southknoll, the area and
the overpass and the Southknoll, and we have witnesses who
(28:15):
said shots game from there. This guy named Tosh Plumbley
who's in the documentary, who was a CIA asset whose
job that day was to fly Johnny Roselli and E
Howard Hunt to Dallas that day. We talked to E.
Howard Hunt's son, Saint John Hunt, and asked him, you know,
because his father told him that he was in Dallas
(28:38):
that day. And we asked Saint John, well, what was
your father doing. He was a CIA at the time.
People know E Howard Hunt from the Watergate plumbers and
the burglars at Watergate, but he was in the CIA
at the time. And I asked Saint John, I said,
what was your father doing there that day? And he
told me he was a benchwarmer And I said, well,
what's a benchwarmer? And he said, if anything went wrong,
(29:00):
he knew every single safe house in that area. He
could get people out of there safely away from it.
That's what his role was. But anyway, Tosh Plumbley flew
them in and he was on the South Knoll opposite
the Grassyn and he said, yeah, a shot came from there.
He said, he knows a shot came from there. And
when you look at all the forensics and you talk
to forensics experts, they'll tell you that one of the
(29:23):
head shots came from that area. And then a lot
of people believe there was also shot from the County
Records building, which was also across the street, across Houston Street,
and that also makes sense to But we couldn't identify
five shooters, but we certainly know that the four that
we identified were in Dallas that day and they were
mob connected and they were connected also to the Cuban
(29:47):
exile community.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So two examples of things that were sort of slowed
down or cord up. The Zapruter film is not made
public until twelve years after the assassination.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Why was it kep hidden Well, for obvious reasons. You
can see shots coming from the front and which would
completely debunk the Warren Commission. But it was bought actually
by Time magazine. They bought the rights to the Suppruder film,
and over the years they just released a couple of
(30:19):
still photographs, but nothing showing the film. It was not
like you're say, until over decade later that the guy,
a guy named Robert Grodin, was on the Geraldo Rivera
show with the comedian Dick Gregory and Groden worked in
a film lab where the film was sent to him.
(30:39):
They were asking if it could be blown up from
its original eight millimeter to thirty five millimeter and to
see if it would hold resolution. Well, he did something
he shouldn't have done, which is he sent the original
back plus the new blown up film, but he kept
a copy for himself and he looked at it and
he said, oh my god, there's a shot coming from
(31:01):
the front. That's ridiculous. And he went on the Viraldo
Show and for the first time they put it out there,
and we have that tape on the podcast as well.
So the public didn't know about that. And like I say,
if you look at the evidence that dropped over sixty years,
sometimes they're twenty and thirty years apart. So if you
listen to the War Commission, it came out in sixty four,
(31:22):
and over decade later you're saying, oh, that's the thing.
You don't put it all together. It's hard to piece
it all together. You're just thinking, oh, okay, well there's
a shot that hit Kennedy. People aren't sophisticated to say, oh,
I'm going to study the forensics on this and figure
it out. It was up to researchers to do all that.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Six decades later, there are still forty six hundred documents classified.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Right, why, Well, that's a great question. Nobody knows why.
I mean, what we've seen released up till now, and
it's been drips and drabs. I mean, there was whatever
you want to say about Oliver Stone's film, They threw
out a whole lot of ideas. They didn't really connect
the dots, they didn't really posit a specific plan. But
(32:09):
what it did was it got people interested in the
Kennedy assassination again. And as a result, the JFK Records
Act was passed, which said that they had to release
to the public everything that was held back over a
period of many years, and the final date came up
a few times under Obama, under Donald Trump and also
(32:31):
under Biden, and they kept withholding, and so we don't
know why they're withholding it or what's being withheld. But
Jefferson Morley, who does a website called JFK Facts, he
was saying that in the last number of years, we've
got all this information about the connection between oswall and
the CIA. It's there, it's right there. You can read it,
you can read about it. He said. There's probably more
(32:54):
information than connecting the two. He said, but the problem
is by the time these things come out, people who
were involved names that they can figure out, they're dead already,
you know, you can't talk to them. So I have
no idea what's in there. My guess is that it's
probably more CIA connections to Oswalder to other entities. One
(33:17):
of the big revelations and the single to me, the
one biggest, most shocking revelation that came out was, as
you said, you felt that the Warren Commission report there
was a cover up, and we believe that as well,
because there's a reason why Alan Dalles, who was the
head of the CIA during Kennedy's time, who was fired
by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs and was put
(33:40):
as being a liaison between the Warren Commission and the CIA,
and no information about the CIA came into that report.
He was a gatekeeper. This is the big revelation. Only
in studying it do you find out and we name it.
There's a fellow named George joan Edes. Nobody knows that name.
It doesn't mean anything to anybody, but George Joan Edes
(34:02):
was the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations,
which was put together in the seventies. When There's a
Bruder film came out, there was a lot more interest
and they decided to re examine that. In the seventies,
George Joan Edes was the guy who was in charge
of being a liaison to the CIA. He was an
EXCIA agent. What they didn't know. We interviewed Robert Blakey,
(34:27):
who was the lead counsel for the House Select Committee,
is that George Joan Edes headed up a program based
in Miami that was a counterintelligence program that developed the
assets like Lee Harvey Oswald, including Lee Harvey Oswald. So
he was furious when he heard that. He said, if
(34:48):
I knew then what I know now, I would have
put that guy on the stand. He was the answer
to all the questions we had as to whether or
not there was any connection between Oswald and the CIA.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
As you render a judgment here because you know vastly
more than almost anybody about this. What's Oswald's role is?
Is he a dupe? Was he the setup?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
He said, I was just a patsy. He said that
a number of times during his incarceration in the Dallas
police station. They had a program that started when Oswald
was seventeen. He got into the Marines. He was stationed
in North Carolina for a while at a place called
Nag's Head. Tosh Plumley, who was the guy who flew
to Moselli and Hunt to Dallas that day, he knew
(35:50):
Oswald there. He was part of the same program. They
were developing wayward youth. They didn't know what they were
going to do with them. Maybe there'll be an asset
somewhere down the road. They don't know, developing people. Then
he goes to Atsugi Base in Japan. He's learning radar
skills for the U two spy planes. He's learned Russian
in the meantime, comes back to America and then eventually
(36:14):
goes to Russia as a defector. And that was the
beginnings of what they call sheep dipping somebody down the
road as an asset. James Angleton, who was the head
of counterintelligence for the CIA at the time, was very
concerned about moles infiltrating the CIA. This was the height
of the Cold War. People were scared. The phrase better
(36:37):
dead than Red was running around. People were scared about
creeping Communism and that they were going to take over krus.
Jefferry famously came to the UN banged his shoe on
a table and said, we will bury you. And that
was the big thing up until Reagan and when he
said tear down this wall. We had a serious Cold
War going on between Russian and the United States. Angleton
(36:58):
wanted to get some moles inside the KGB and that's
a program he had and Oswald was part of that.
I mean, it didn't work out, Soka, they didn't find anything.
But he came back to America. He was not debriefed,
he was given a job right away. He was connected
to assets of the CIA to help him reacclimate into America.
(37:21):
And so he was being developed and like I say,
at one point they're going to call him in or not,
you know, depending on what they decided to do, so, Yeah,
he was definitely a patsy.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
So in that narrative, I mean, is Jack Ruby an asset?
Here's where Jackie Ruby plays the role. And by the way,
that's the nexus point of this whole thing. Jack Ruby,
this two bit nightclub owner that owns a place called
the Carousel Club in Dallas, walks into the police station and.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Kills Lee Harvey Oswald. Why it makes no sense. The
reason he gave at the time was he wanted to
spare Jackie Kennedy a trial. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous on
its face. When we drilled down into it and I
interviewed a guy named John Currington, he's in the podcast.
He worked for hl Hunk, the big oilman in Dallas,
(38:14):
and when Oswald was arrested and taken to the Dallas
Police station. Crrington was like a right hand man to
Hunt for ten fifteen years. Hunt calls him up and says,
go to the Dallas Police station and find out what
kind of security they have. So he goes down there,
he comes back and reports to Hunt. He says, there's
no security. I walked in. I had a briefcase. They
(38:35):
never checked that. I walked around he said, Okay, get
me Josephllo. I want a meeting with Josevello. Josephllo was
the head of the mob in the Dallas area and
it was Joseivello that then arranged for Ruby to go
in there. And what's interesting the thing about Ruby is
when he arrived at the Dallas police station to kill Oswald,
(38:57):
that was in the first time he was there. He
was there two times prior to that. One time. We
have them on tape actually standing there in a press
gaggle when they're asking the DA and Oswald's right there.
Somebody asked him, was Oswald part of the Free Cuba
Committee or something like that, and there's Ruby right there
in the press gaggle. He says, no, no, it was
(39:17):
the Fair Play for Cuba committee. He actually corrects that.
I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. By the way, all
the cops used to go to his club. They knew him,
and Oswald knew Ruby. I mean, we have hard evidence
of Oswald and Ruby spending time together. And that's another
thing though. Barn Commissioner said, Oswald, you know, and Ruby
never knew each other. It's not true. It's just not true.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
I have to say given all the research you've done
and the remarkable penetration that your podcast is developing. At
a minimum, we ought to be able to get the
forty six hundred documents released.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
You would think if you were in Congress right now,
you'd get that done, although I don't know that you
want to be in Congress these days.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah. Look, I'm going to talk to some friends of
mine because I think you've done an extraordinary level of research.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Oh. Thanks. You know, I've been thinking about this, Like
I say, whenever anything new comes out, and I'm sure
some new stuff will come out if we can get
those I think it's forty eight hundred or whatever it is,
forty six to forty eight hundred, we'll get those, then
there'll be new stuff to pour over.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
I was a graduate student at Tulane when the New
Orleans District Attorney decided he would solve it.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah. Oh that was a mess. That thing was a mess.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
So I've been in and out of this stuff for
my whole career. I think that what you've done is astonishing,
and I think who killed JFK is something that is
going to have a genuine long term impact, and it
also explains the faith we had in the system through
World War Two is shattered in nineteen sixty three, and
(40:55):
I think the Warren Commission is a further part of
shattering it. And we've never recovered.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
One hundred percent. After the Second World War, we were
the good guys. We beat the Nazis, we were the victors,
and then this happened, and it was the beginning, and
then we get into the Vietnam War and the trust
in government starts to erode, and we're seeing it now
where trust in government is that it's lowest I think
(41:23):
in my lifetime, certainly.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
And I think insisting on getting to the truth and
insisting on getting to the facts is part of how
you rebuild that. And I think what you've done here
is genuinely an important civic event. I'm very curious, Rob,
given that this has been amazingly successful five and a
half million downloads already and more coming, have you considered
turning it into a documentary?
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yes. As a matter of fact, I'm going to start
presenting this idea in the next week or so to
some of the streamers. Not only that, but we're in
talks of expanding this as a book, and we're going
to go out to publishers.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
So yes, I could imagine this as a sex or
ten part series on Netflix or somewhere that would get
huge viewership.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
I hope. So, I hope they think the same as you.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
First of all, as I said to you at the
very beginning, just to be with you and the scale
of your talent and the impact you've had on all
of us. I mean, you have been in our lives
for most of my lifetime. Literally I could have talked
to you for hours and hours. But I want to
encourage all of our listeners to listen to Who Killed JFK,
which is part of iHeart Podcast. You can get it
(42:30):
on the iHeart app Ample podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.
And Rob, I want to thank you. This has been
one of the most exciting interviews I've done on my podcast.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Oh thanks Nude, I appreciate it. I had a great time.
It was great to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Thank you to my guest, Rob Reiner. You can get
a link to listen to the Who Killed JFK Podcast
on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is
produced by Ginger three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer
is RG Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special
(43:07):
thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three freeweekly columns at gingerishfree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
On this episode of Nuts World. Rob Reiner first came
to fame as a two time Emmy Award winning actor
on the Landmark television series All in the Family. He
went on to become an acclaimed director of some of
the most popular and influential motion pictures. His work ranges
from satire This Is Spinal Tap, which is one of
(00:26):
my favorites, to dramas like stand By Me, Misery, A
Few Good Men and Ghost of Mississippi, to romantic comedies
like When Harry Met Sally and the American President, to
the enduring classic The Princess Bride. His now twenty films
also include The Bucket List, Flipped, LBJ starring Woody Harrelson,
(00:47):
and most recently Shock and Awe, which exposed the lies
that led to the US invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Rob, along with his.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Wife Michelle and Matthew George, continue to run Castle Rock
Entertainment and film production company. He's joining me today to
discuss his new ten part podcast entitled Who Killed JFK
In commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of President John F.
Kennedy's tragic assassination. Reiner and journalist Soledad O'Brien interview CIA officials,
(01:20):
medical experts, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, eyewitnesses, and a former
Secret Service agent who in twenty twenty three came forward
with groundbreaking new evidence. They also discussed their own theories
of who killed JFK, how that question has shaped America,
and why it matters that sixty years later we're still
(01:41):
asking the question. Rob. Welcome and thank you for joining
me on Newtsworld.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Thanks for having me Newton.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
This is great and I have to say when I
learned that, I think it's correct that when Harry met Sally,
the woman in the background who says I'll take whichever
she has is I think your mother.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yes, yes, my mother, and she took her place in
the pantheon of most quoted lines in movies.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
It's an amazing scene and anybody who hasn't seen it
now you've got to go see it to see what
we're talking about. Let me start with you grew up
with one of the great comedians of all time, a
man who, in someone has invented much of television comedy,
and that's Carl Reiner. He did one hundred and fifty
eight episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, so from
your own background. I mean, were you just sort of
(02:39):
automatically in the entertainment business.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
You know, it seems like I was, because that was
what I was surrounded by my whole life growing up.
I mean, mel Brooks was around, and Norman Lear and
all of these, you know, great comedians and comic writers.
And I've often said that if you look at anything
that you laughed at in the second half of the
(03:03):
twentieth century, it came from my father in the Sid
Caesar Show. You had Neil Simon, and like I said,
mel Brooks and Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart, all these
great writers writing some of the funniest things you ever
can imagine. And that's the atmosphere that I grew up in.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And then when you're superty young, you go to the
Bucks County Playhouse, which was a fairly famous local playhouse
in NewHope, Pennsylvania, and again you're working with people who
become famous.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah. I was an apprentice, you know, I was building scenery,
painting sets and things like that. I wasn't anybody in
those days. But yeah, I mean, you know, merv Griffin
came and did a show, and Alan Ald and Shelley Berman.
All these people came through and it was a great
exposure and a great way. It was my first job.
I guess you would say didn't get paid for it,
(03:53):
but it was my first job in show business.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Well, and I didn't realize that your writing career starts
with his mother's brother's Comedy Hour, and your writing partner
is one of the great comedians of our time, Steve Martin.
I mean, what was it like to interact regularly with Steve?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Well, we were the two youngest. I was twenty one,
Steve was twenty three, So I think they threw us
together because we were the youngest ones. And we wrote
a couple of great sketches and it was fun. Because
we were young. We didn't know Tommy Smothers was always
fighting with the censors. I mean, we were at a
time when there was a lot going on in the world.
We had the Vietnam War, we had the civil rights
(04:28):
movement heating up, and the women's movement, and we wrote
some very cutting edge things, and Tommy always had a
fight with the censors. He was always fighting, and I
didn't understand, why can't we just put this on you know,
why can't we just do this because you're a young kid,
you don't know any different. But Tommy was, and he
just passed away recently too, and you know, I miss
him and Norman Lee or my dad. I was talking
(04:51):
to my friend Albert Brooks and I said, all these
people are dying around me and he said, well.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Move well, you know, and it's fascinating because you are
part of a generation of comedians that years ago, I
read Steve Allen's book The Funny Man, and there's this
whole pattern of comedy and people learning from each other
and sort of grows on itself and it evolves, it does.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
I mean, you take from each other. I mean, you know,
you can't help but be influenced. I mean I was very,
very lucky in that I had two men in my life,
my father obviously and Norman Lear, who were great role models,
and I looked up to them. People always ask me, well,
did they give you advice? And so on. They don't
sit you down and give you advice. The advice they
(05:39):
give is you observe how they live, and that's the
best advice you can get. Is they model how to
be with other people, how to create, how to do
what they do. And that's what I took from both
of them. I learned from my dad how to handle
being famous and you know, dealing with the world. And
I learned from Norman that you can take your fame,
(06:02):
your celebrity and whatever, and you can create things, and
you can also use them for good. You know, if
there's issues that you care about, you can promote them
through your celebrity, and I've fortunately been able to do
that as well.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
The great breakthrough in your career, which leads to everything else,
is when you play Meathead on All in the Family,
which was a huge hit and you won two Primetime
Emmy Awards. It's a great role, and of course it's
part of the reason that it's an honor for me
to be interviewing you, because you are so much a
part of my life. How did you end up with
(06:38):
that role?
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Well, you know, it's interesting because normally did two pilots
with ABC and they didn't sell. And I auditioned for
one of those pilots and I didn't get the part.
But then I guess I matured a little bit, I
got a little better as an actor, and he saw
me in some things that I did, and then I
went and auditioned a second time, and this time I
(07:01):
got the part, and oddly enough I auditioned with my
soon to be wife, Penny Marshall, who passed away a
little while ago, and Penny didn't get the part. Sally
Struthers did and the rest, as they say, is history.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Well, and you had Carol O'Connor and Jeans Stable. To me,
the four of you made such a great troop, if
you will, the chemistry seemed amazing.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, the chemistry was incredible, And you know, when you're
making a show like that, and we did eight seasons,
We did over two hundred episodes, and you know, you
spend more time with those people in your TV family
than you do it with your real family, because you're
there for you know, ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day,
(07:44):
and so it becomes a family. And we wore a family.
We loved each other and we supported each other and
it was an incredible experience.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
How much of the chemistry was Norman Lear?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Oh, a lot, a lot. Recently, I was on the
Emmy Awards show program and Sally Struthers and I introduced
the clip package that was about immemoriam the people who
had passed away in the last year, and it started
with Norman Lear. And one thing I said about Norman,
aside from all the great things he did and the
(08:16):
culture he changed by the work he did, was that
I called him it's a Yiddish phrase. I called him
a cook level. It's a Yiddish phrase that means ladle.
It's something that stirs the pot. And that's what Norman did.
He stirred the pot. He always tried to get the
best out of you, and he said, dig into your cls,
find out what you feel and what you believe, and
(08:38):
we'll get that into the scripts. And so he did that.
He was a tremendous catalyst for all the success of
not just All in the Family, but the Jeffersons and
Maud and Good Times and one day at a time,
all the shows that he had. I think he had
like eight primetime shows on at one time, which is astounding.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
It was remarkable. Now you took all that experience, in
that knowledge, and you become a director, starting with a
film I've always liked, which is the heavy metal mockumentary
this is Spinal Tap. First of all, what inspired you
to become a director, And second why that show is
your launch point?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Well, I always wanted to direct, even before I did
All the Family. When I was nineteen, I was at
UCLA and I formed an improvisational group and was called
The Session, and I directed it and acted in it,
and we got a theater on Sunset, and I did
that for a while. I directed plays and Los Angeles,
(09:35):
and so when I got All the Family, it basically
was kind of interrupting in a weird way my directing career,
which is what I always wanted to do. So that
was something I wanted to do from the get go. Now,
Spinal Tap came to be because I was talking to
Harry Sheer, who plays Derek Small's in the film, and
we had an idea to do a film called Roadie
(09:59):
and it was all about the road managers and the
behind the scenes for rock and Roll. Now. In nineteen
seventy eight, Harry and myself and Chris Guest who plays Nigel,
and Michael McKean who plays David sat humans. We did
a TV show called The TV Show of All Things,
and it was a satire of various things on television,
sitcoms and commercials and telethons, all kinds of stuff. And
(10:23):
one of the things we did to take off was
Saturday night. It was called Midnight Special and it was
a rock and roll program that came on Saturday night
and I played wolf Man Jack and we had this
band called Spinal Tap, and this is the first time
they ever appeared, and they did a song called rock
and Roll Nightmare. And during the time we were working
on it, between takes, Harry and Michael and Chris started
(10:45):
ad libbing, you know, as these British rock and roll guys,
and so down the Road we said, hey, you know,
maybe we could do something with these guys. We'll do
a movie about them. And so that eventually Down the
Road became the basis for Spinal Tap.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
In a sense, because Spinal Tap was humor and that
kind of goes out of a lot of your background experience.
But when I think about, for example, A Few Good Men,
that is a long way from humor. That's very different.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, there's some comedy in it, but basically it's a drama.
I mean, it's a serious drama and it's based on
a true story. Actually, Aaron Sorkin's sister was in the
jag Coars during this period, and there was a colonel
who was on this military base in Bontanamo, and he
(11:32):
did get court martialed because he illegally ordered a code
read done on a marine that was under his auspices.
And they had a trial and he eventually left the
Marine Corps, and you know, it was kind of uncomfortable,
and that became the basis for the play A Few
(11:53):
Good Men, which Aaron wrote and was on Broadway and
then we adapted it for the screen.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
No, it's a very very power, powerful movie.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Thanks. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, of all your films, and I have such a
broad range, is there anyone you look back and you
say that's my favorite.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Well, you know, Newt it's like all your children. We
love them all, even the ones who are rotten at times.
But no, I think I don't know if it's my
best film. But the one that means the most to
me is Stand by Me because it was the first
time in my life that I did a film that
(12:28):
really reflected my personality. You know, my father started doing
satire and you know, as you just pointed out, spinal
Tap was a satire. Then I did a small film
called The Sure Thing, which is a romantic comedy about
young people. And my dad had done a number of
romantic comedies. But stand By Me was the first time
I did something that had humor in it. It had nostalgia,
(12:49):
it had melancholy, it had all these elements, and it
was more reflective of my personality. And so when it
became successful, it validated the things I wanted to do,
and I've tried to marry drama and humor in most
of the things I do.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You had an amazing run there because you do stand
by Me in eighty six. You come back with an
iconic film, The Princess Bride in eighty seven, and I
would argue an equally iconic film when Harry met Sally
in eighty nine. I mean you were on a real
role at that point.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, yeah, And when Harry met Sally. There's a good
story about this, which is, not only did my mother
say that line, I'll have what she's having, but I
met my wife, who I will be married to for
thirty five years in May. I met her making that film,
and I changed the ending of the film because I
(13:41):
met her while we were making the film. I had
been single for ten years. After having been married for
ten years, I was now divorced and single. I was
making a mess, a complete mess. Of my dating life.
You know, I was with this one. I broke up.
I couldn't make it work with this one. It was
all that kind of stuff, and that became the basis
for when Harry met Sally. So I didn't see how
(14:02):
I was ever going to be with anybody. So that's
the way it ended initially that they didn't get together,
And when I met Michelle, I said, oh, I see
I could be with somebody, and then then went and
changed the ending.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Which changes the whole movie.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
It's the whole movie, and I think it would not
have been successful. I don't think if the two of
them hadn't gotten together at the end.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
It's a remarkable film. You've done all these amazing things
as an actor, as a director, as a writer, and
(14:47):
then you turn your attention to JFK, which, of course,
for our generation, was one of the moments that shattered
our lives and forced us to confront that there's evil
in the world and that things can happen you can't control.
It's remarkably successful. Who Killed JFK has five and a
half million total downloads, spent weeks at number one on
(15:08):
Apple's Top podcast chart, has been the number one history
podcast for over two months. I mean, you're obviously hit
a home run here, but what led you into doing this?
Because it's a big project.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
You'll appreciate it because if you were alive at that time,
you knew exactly where you were when you heard that news.
Nothing had ever happened like that in modern American history.
A president being gunned down in broad daylight on an
American street. It was just shocking. It was a national trauma.
(15:41):
And I remember I was sixteen at the time. I
was in physics class in high school and a kid
came in whispered in the teacher's ear, and future turned
to us and said, I have some terrible news, and
he told us what had happened, and we were all
sent home from school. And I sat there like everybody else,
(16:01):
and watched television and watched continuously to see what was
going on. And I actually saw, like many many people did.
I watched the man who was accused of killing the president,
Lee Harvey Oswald, shot and killed himself on live television,
and never seen anything like that before, so it was
like shocking. Again. I was only seventeen. I didn't really
(16:25):
understand what had happened, and it wasn't until after the
Warren Commission report came out. I read this book called
Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane, and he questioned the
Warren Commission report. He started talking about things that either
didn't make sense or warrant accurate and all of this,
and I started getting interested in it.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Then.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I was about nineteen, I think at the time, and
I was playing at the Hungry Eye up in San
Francisco with my friend Larry Bishop, and we opened for
Carmen McCrae. And in the smaller room there was a
little room and there was median Mort Sahl, who, for
those of you who don't know who that is, he
was a very famous political satirist. He used to do
(17:07):
political satires. He was a comedian. But this time he
was not talking about it at all. All he talked
about was the Warren Commission Report and that it was
something wrong with it and it didn't make sense and
all this stuff. And that got me even more interested.
So from that point on, for almost sixty years, anytime
a new thing would come out, it was a book
(17:30):
or a new bit of evidence, or something would emerge.
I was fascinated by it. And the reason I did
the podcast is because if you're not following this closely,
you know, something emerges and you go, well, that's interesting,
but what does that have to do with everything else?
How do you put this together? And based on everything
(17:50):
I had read, all the forensics experts I had talked to,
visiting Dealey Plaza many times, going to the school book depository,
going up to the sixth floor, studying that, I started
piecing it together. I went to where Oswald boarding house
where he stayed, and I started piecing it all together
with all the information. I said, I'd like to put
(18:10):
together what I think happened and what I believe happened
on that fateful day and for people who have not
been following it. Intimately put the pieces together so that
people who don't know much about it will get a
sense of it, and people who have been researching it
and studying it for years will maybe learn a little
(18:31):
bit more and put it all together. So that's what
led me to do it. And you know, in the
last six seven years, I ran into a great researcher
named Dick Russell, who wrote a book called The Man
Who Knew Too Much was all about a guy named
Richard K. Snagel who was a CIA asset who worked
for the military, who was a military intelligence guy, and
(18:52):
he knew Lee Harvey Oswald. And I started learning about
people who knew Lee Harvey Oswald, learned about the files
that the CIA kept on Lee RV. Oswell. They have
thousands and thousands of pages of files which have been
released over the years, but in the Warrant Commission report,
there's no mention. There's like saying, we don't really know
(19:13):
Lee Harvey Oswell, we don't know much about him. He
was alone assassin. And then you find out there's thousands
of pages of tracking Lee Harvey Oswald for years, for
four years prior to the assassination. So you start putting
all these pieces together and you learn, You learn what
this one did and what that one did. And we
(19:33):
have eyewitnesses, people who were there that day who will
say very specific things. Listen to the podcast. You're going
to get it all. You're going to hear what happened.
And we don't put anything out there that we can't substantiate.
I mean, we named four shooters. Now, exactly where they
were positioned, we don't know, but we do know, and
(19:56):
this is based on hard evidence. We know that there
were four assassins present in Dallas that day. And here's
something interesting. And I didn't talk about this on the podcast,
but and I don't think John Brennan will mind me
saying this. It's not classified in any way. But I've
become friends with John Brennan over the years, and I
(20:19):
was having dinner with him one night, and I was
dying to ask him what he knew. You know, I'm
so steeped in it, but I didn't. I didn't ask
him because you know, I just felt awkward. And then
you know, at the end of the meal, he said
to me, so, what are you working on these days?
You know, just a casual kind of thing. And I said, well,
you know, I'm working on this idea about the Kennedy assassination.
(20:40):
He says, what do you think about that? And I
started to tell him the things that I thought. And
at one point I said to him, what do you
know about a man named Richard case Nagel? And he
said to me, well, what do you know about Richard
case Nagel? Like that? And I tell him what I know.
You know, the things I knew, which your all documented.
(21:01):
I mean, there are newspaper reports for all this, and
then at one point his wife Cathy says, John, do
you think there's any reason why Rob should not pursue this?
And all he said at the time was no, I
think it's always a good idea to revisit history, That's
all he said. And then two weeks later I got
(21:21):
an email from him saying that there's a man that
he worked with in the CIA. And by the way,
this guy his name is Ralph Mowatt Larson, he's in
the podcast. We interview him for the podcast. This is
a man that John worked with for twenty years. He
had been a Moscow Bureau chief for a while, and
he said he has some similar thoughts to what you
(21:41):
are presenting. Would you like to meet him? So I
went to DC with my wife Michelle, and we met
sat down, had dinner with him, and he did lay
out a similar idea to what we had. Oddly enough,
he named one of the people that he believed was
one of the shooters, and it was one of the
shooters that we had already identified, a fellow named Jack Cannon,
(22:04):
who we talk about in the podcast. But essentially what
he said it had in his mind. It had all
the ear marks and the markings of a rogue CIA
operation and how it was done, and so you know,
it kind of corroborated the way in which I thought
about it. But you have to understand, this is not
(22:25):
a from the top bottom kind of thing. No paper
trail for this. You're not going to say, somebody's gonna
write down, well, we're going to kill a president today,
here's your job, here's your job. You know, it doesn't
work that way. It's done in very clandestine ways. And
we get into how this could happen and the allies
that they had, and we try to approach it like
a crime, and we call it the greatest murder mystery
(22:48):
in American history, and we approach it the way you
would an investigation, which is, who are the suspects, who
had motive, what are the forensics, and then you start
to put it together. And it's obviously it's a circumstantial case,
but if you put the pieces together, you start to
form a picture that's fairly clear.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Well, it's justly because you were so exhaustive about this,
and like you, that was one of the defining moments
of my life. But I have a similar passion about
what exactly happened and I'm pretty convinced that the War
and Commission was a cover up. You make the case
that Texas Governor John Connolly said for his whole life
(23:28):
that he was not hit by the same bullet.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
No, no, he's always said that till the day died.
And we know that that's true because the Warrant Commission
had a real problem. They had a real problem, which
is they said there were only three shots that came
from the sixth floor of the book depository. Now, the
problem they had was that the first shot missed and
(23:54):
it hit a curb and a little piece of concrete
was flicked up, hit a bystander named James Tag in
the cheek and his cheeks started to bleed all of
a sudden. So now they're down to two shots. They
have only got two shots. We know a shot hit
President Kennedy in the head. You can see it on
the Zappruter film. So that's one shot. So that leaves
(24:15):
one bullet left, and that one bullet has to do
a lot of stuff. First of all, the autopsy diagram
show that a bullet entered Kennedy's back about six to
eight inches below his neck. The one they're talking about,
which they call the single bullet theory, by the way,
was developed by Arlen Spector, who was a counsel to
(24:36):
the Warrant Commission at the time. The bullet goes into
Kennedy's back six to eight inches below his neck, then
travels up and comes out his throat, then makes a turn.
This would have had to what happened. Hits Connelly in
the armpit, in the ribs, and then makes another turn,
(24:57):
breaking some of his wristbones. That makes another turn and
goes into his thigh. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. It
makes no sense. And by the way, the bullet that
they said did that winds up as Evidence number three
ninety nine. You can see it. It's in the archives.
It's also in the Warrant Commission report. It's virtually a
(25:19):
pristine bullet. Has a little striations on the tip of it,
but other than that it is pristine. And they say
it wound up on the stretcher of Connolly. And so
this came out during the podcast while we're doing the podcast.
It came out this guy Paul Landis, who was a
Secret Service agent who was in the trail car behind
(25:40):
Kennedy's car, who's on the running board and witnessed the
whole thing. He said, the bullet that hit Kennedy in
the head, he said, brain matter and skull matter was
flying at him, flying in his direction, and he had
a duck to miss all this stuff that was coming
at him. Then when they arrived at Parkland Hospital, he
(26:00):
was in charge of helping missus Kennedy up. He helped
her up, They got the president out, getting him into
the hospital. When he helped her up, he noticed there
was a pool of blood in the backseat of the limo,
and then resting on the head part of the seat
was this bullet. This bullet that became the one that
(26:21):
was in the archives. And he didn't testify at all,
and the Warren Commission, by the way, never asked for it.
Not only his testimony, but no Secret Service testimony was
in the Warrant Commission. So years later he saw this
bullet and he said, Hey, that's my bullet. That's the bullet.
He picked it up because he thought, this is an
important piece of evidence. I don't want it somebody grab
(26:43):
it for a souvenir. He put it in his pocket
and he went into the emergency room and he took
the bullet and he put it by Kennedy's body, thinking that,
you know, they'd find it or whatever. But the point
is that's not a bullet that went through Connelly because
it's there in the backseat of the car. So the
whole thing, it just corroborates the whole idea of the
(27:05):
crazy single bullet theory. But they had to have that
theory otherwise they couldn't pin it all on Oswald. Now
we're not saying there wasn't a shooter up on the
sixth floor. There was. There was, and there were witnesses
who saw a shooter on the sixth floor, but that's
not the whole story. There were other shooters in other positions.
Based on the forensics, we can pretty well place where
(27:28):
those shooters were.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
And you think there were four of them.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Well, I think they're either four or five. We didn't
say five only because we couldn't identify five assassins in
Dallas that day. Most people think they were four to five.
There are some people think only two. But if you
look at the forensics and you study it, it couldn't
have been done in two positions. We say yes, the
(27:53):
school book depository, sixth floor what has become to be
known as the Grassy Knoll where some shots came from.
There's a building behind Houston Street called the dal Text Building,
which easily could have accounted for some of the wounds
from there. And then there's the Southknoll, the area and
the overpass and the Southknoll, and we have witnesses who
(28:15):
said shots game from there. This guy named Tosh Plumbley
who's in the documentary, who was a CIA asset whose
job that day was to fly Johnny Roselli and E
Howard Hunt to Dallas that day. We talked to E.
Howard Hunt's son, Saint John Hunt, and asked him, you know,
because his father told him that he was in Dallas
(28:38):
that day. And we asked Saint John, well, what was
your father doing. He was a CIA at the time.
People know E Howard Hunt from the Watergate plumbers and
the burglars at Watergate, but he was in the CIA
at the time. And I asked Saint John, I said,
what was your father doing there that day? And he
told me he was a benchwarmer And I said, well,
what's a benchwarmer? And he said, if anything went wrong,
(29:00):
he knew every single safe house in that area. He
could get people out of there safely away from it.
That's what his role was. But anyway, Tosh Plumbley flew
them in and he was on the South Knoll opposite
the Grassyn and he said, yeah, a shot came from there.
He said, he knows a shot came from there. And
when you look at all the forensics and you talk
to forensics experts, they'll tell you that one of the
(29:23):
head shots came from that area. And then a lot
of people believe there was also shot from the County
Records building, which was also across the street, across Houston Street,
and that also makes sense to But we couldn't identify
five shooters, but we certainly know that the four that
we identified were in Dallas that day and they were
mob connected and they were connected also to the Cuban
(29:47):
exile community.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So two examples of things that were sort of slowed
down or cord up. The Zapruter film is not made
public until twelve years after the assassination.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Why was it kep hidden Well, for obvious reasons. You
can see shots coming from the front and which would
completely debunk the Warren Commission. But it was bought actually
by Time magazine. They bought the rights to the Suppruder film,
and over the years they just released a couple of
(30:19):
still photographs, but nothing showing the film. It was not
like you're say, until over decade later that the guy,
a guy named Robert Grodin, was on the Geraldo Rivera
show with the comedian Dick Gregory and Groden worked in
a film lab where the film was sent to him.
(30:39):
They were asking if it could be blown up from
its original eight millimeter to thirty five millimeter and to
see if it would hold resolution. Well, he did something
he shouldn't have done, which is he sent the original
back plus the new blown up film, but he kept
a copy for himself and he looked at it and
he said, oh my god, there's a shot coming from
(31:01):
the front. That's ridiculous. And he went on the Viraldo
Show and for the first time they put it out there,
and we have that tape on the podcast as well.
So the public didn't know about that. And like I say,
if you look at the evidence that dropped over sixty years,
sometimes they're twenty and thirty years apart. So if you
listen to the War Commission, it came out in sixty four,
(31:22):
and over decade later you're saying, oh, that's the thing.
You don't put it all together. It's hard to piece
it all together. You're just thinking, oh, okay, well there's
a shot that hit Kennedy. People aren't sophisticated to say, oh,
I'm going to study the forensics on this and figure
it out. It was up to researchers to do all that.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Six decades later, there are still forty six hundred documents classified.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Right, why, Well, that's a great question. Nobody knows why.
I mean, what we've seen released up till now, and
it's been drips and drabs. I mean, there was whatever
you want to say about Oliver Stone's film, They threw
out a whole lot of ideas. They didn't really connect
the dots, they didn't really posit a specific plan. But
(32:09):
what it did was it got people interested in the
Kennedy assassination again. And as a result, the JFK Records
Act was passed, which said that they had to release
to the public everything that was held back over a
period of many years, and the final date came up
a few times under Obama, under Donald Trump and also
(32:31):
under Biden, and they kept withholding, and so we don't
know why they're withholding it or what's being withheld. But
Jefferson Morley, who does a website called JFK Facts, he
was saying that in the last number of years, we've
got all this information about the connection between oswall and
the CIA. It's there, it's right there. You can read it,
you can read about it. He said. There's probably more
(32:54):
information than connecting the two. He said, but the problem
is by the time these things come out, people who
were involved names that they can figure out, they're dead already,
you know, you can't talk to them. So I have
no idea what's in there. My guess is that it's
probably more CIA connections to Oswalder to other entities. One
(33:17):
of the big revelations and the single to me, the
one biggest, most shocking revelation that came out was, as
you said, you felt that the Warren Commission report there
was a cover up, and we believe that as well,
because there's a reason why Alan Dalles, who was the
head of the CIA during Kennedy's time, who was fired
by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs and was put
(33:40):
as being a liaison between the Warren Commission and the CIA,
and no information about the CIA came into that report.
He was a gatekeeper. This is the big revelation. Only
in studying it do you find out and we name it.
There's a fellow named George joan Edes. Nobody knows that name.
It doesn't mean anything to anybody, but George Joan Edes
(34:02):
was the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations,
which was put together in the seventies. When There's a
Bruder film came out, there was a lot more interest
and they decided to re examine that. In the seventies,
George Joan Edes was the guy who was in charge
of being a liaison to the CIA. He was an
EXCIA agent. What they didn't know. We interviewed Robert Blakey,
(34:27):
who was the lead counsel for the House Select Committee,
is that George Joan Edes headed up a program based
in Miami that was a counterintelligence program that developed the
assets like Lee Harvey Oswald, including Lee Harvey Oswald. So
he was furious when he heard that. He said, if
(34:48):
I knew then what I know now, I would have
put that guy on the stand. He was the answer
to all the questions we had as to whether or
not there was any connection between Oswald and the CIA.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
As you render a judgment here because you know vastly
more than almost anybody about this. What's Oswald's role is?
Is he a dupe? Was he the setup?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
He said, I was just a patsy. He said that
a number of times during his incarceration in the Dallas
police station. They had a program that started when Oswald
was seventeen. He got into the Marines. He was stationed
in North Carolina for a while at a place called
Nag's Head. Tosh Plumley, who was the guy who flew
to Moselli and Hunt to Dallas that day, he knew
(35:50):
Oswald there. He was part of the same program. They
were developing wayward youth. They didn't know what they were
going to do with them. Maybe there'll be an asset
somewhere down the road. They don't know, developing people. Then
he goes to Atsugi Base in Japan. He's learning radar
skills for the U two spy planes. He's learned Russian
in the meantime, comes back to America and then eventually
(36:14):
goes to Russia as a defector. And that was the
beginnings of what they call sheep dipping somebody down the
road as an asset. James Angleton, who was the head
of counterintelligence for the CIA at the time, was very
concerned about moles infiltrating the CIA. This was the height
of the Cold War. People were scared. The phrase better
(36:37):
dead than Red was running around. People were scared about
creeping Communism and that they were going to take over krus.
Jefferry famously came to the UN banged his shoe on
a table and said, we will bury you. And that
was the big thing up until Reagan and when he
said tear down this wall. We had a serious Cold
War going on between Russian and the United States. Angleton
(36:58):
wanted to get some moles inside the KGB and that's
a program he had and Oswald was part of that.
I mean, it didn't work out, Soka, they didn't find anything.
But he came back to America. He was not debriefed,
he was given a job right away. He was connected
to assets of the CIA to help him reacclimate into America.
(37:21):
And so he was being developed and like I say,
at one point they're going to call him in or not,
you know, depending on what they decided to do, so, Yeah,
he was definitely a patsy.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
So in that narrative, I mean, is Jack Ruby an asset?
Here's where Jackie Ruby plays the role. And by the way,
that's the nexus point of this whole thing. Jack Ruby,
this two bit nightclub owner that owns a place called
the Carousel Club in Dallas, walks into the police station and.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Kills Lee Harvey Oswald. Why it makes no sense. The
reason he gave at the time was he wanted to
spare Jackie Kennedy a trial. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous on
its face. When we drilled down into it and I
interviewed a guy named John Currington, he's in the podcast.
He worked for hl Hunk, the big oilman in Dallas,
(38:14):
and when Oswald was arrested and taken to the Dallas
Police station. Crrington was like a right hand man to
Hunt for ten fifteen years. Hunt calls him up and says,
go to the Dallas Police station and find out what
kind of security they have. So he goes down there,
he comes back and reports to Hunt. He says, there's
no security. I walked in. I had a briefcase. They
(38:35):
never checked that. I walked around he said, Okay, get
me Josephllo. I want a meeting with Josevello. Josephllo was
the head of the mob in the Dallas area and
it was Joseivello that then arranged for Ruby to go
in there. And what's interesting the thing about Ruby is
when he arrived at the Dallas police station to kill Oswald,
(38:57):
that was in the first time he was there. He
was there two times prior to that. One time. We
have them on tape actually standing there in a press
gaggle when they're asking the DA and Oswald's right there.
Somebody asked him, was Oswald part of the Free Cuba
Committee or something like that, and there's Ruby right there
in the press gaggle. He says, no, no, it was
(39:17):
the Fair Play for Cuba committee. He actually corrects that.
I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. By the way, all
the cops used to go to his club. They knew him,
and Oswald knew Ruby. I mean, we have hard evidence
of Oswald and Ruby spending time together. And that's another
thing though. Barn Commissioner said, Oswald, you know, and Ruby
never knew each other. It's not true. It's just not true.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
I have to say given all the research you've done
and the remarkable penetration that your podcast is developing. At
a minimum, we ought to be able to get the
forty six hundred documents released.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
You would think if you were in Congress right now,
you'd get that done, although I don't know that you
want to be in Congress these days.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah. Look, I'm going to talk to some friends of
mine because I think you've done an extraordinary level of research.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Oh. Thanks. You know, I've been thinking about this, Like
I say, whenever anything new comes out, and I'm sure
some new stuff will come out if we can get
those I think it's forty eight hundred or whatever it is,
forty six to forty eight hundred, we'll get those, then
there'll be new stuff to pour over.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
I was a graduate student at Tulane when the New
Orleans District Attorney decided he would solve it.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah. Oh that was a mess. That thing was a mess.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
So I've been in and out of this stuff for
my whole career. I think that what you've done is astonishing,
and I think who killed JFK is something that is
going to have a genuine long term impact, and it
also explains the faith we had in the system through
World War Two is shattered in nineteen sixty three, and
(40:55):
I think the Warren Commission is a further part of
shattering it. And we've never recovered.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
One hundred percent. After the Second World War, we were
the good guys. We beat the Nazis, we were the victors,
and then this happened, and it was the beginning, and
then we get into the Vietnam War and the trust
in government starts to erode, and we're seeing it now
where trust in government is that it's lowest I think
(41:23):
in my lifetime, certainly.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
And I think insisting on getting to the truth and
insisting on getting to the facts is part of how
you rebuild that. And I think what you've done here
is genuinely an important civic event. I'm very curious, Rob,
given that this has been amazingly successful five and a
half million downloads already and more coming, have you considered
turning it into a documentary?
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yes. As a matter of fact, I'm going to start
presenting this idea in the next week or so to
some of the streamers. Not only that, but we're in
talks of expanding this as a book, and we're going
to go out to publishers.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
So yes, I could imagine this as a sex or
ten part series on Netflix or somewhere that would get
huge viewership.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
I hope. So, I hope they think the same as you.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
First of all, as I said to you at the
very beginning, just to be with you and the scale
of your talent and the impact you've had on all
of us. I mean, you have been in our lives
for most of my lifetime. Literally I could have talked
to you for hours and hours. But I want to
encourage all of our listeners to listen to Who Killed JFK,
which is part of iHeart Podcast. You can get it
(42:30):
on the iHeart app Ample podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.
And Rob, I want to thank you. This has been
one of the most exciting interviews I've done on my podcast.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Oh thanks Nude, I appreciate it. I had a great time.
It was great to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Thank you to my guest, Rob Reiner. You can get
a link to listen to the Who Killed JFK Podcast
on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is
produced by Ginger three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer
is RG Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special
(43:07):
thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three freeweekly columns at gingerishfree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
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