[♪♪♪]
[suspenseful music]
[tense music]
[gunshot]
[dramatic music]
[Richard Schweiker] This report documents
the failures of the US intelligence establishment
in their investigation
of President Kennedy's assassination,
and their cover up to the Warren Commission.
During the 1975 Church Committee investigation
of US intelligence activities,
Committee Member Richard Schweiker,
in an interview at the time, remarked about Oswald that
"everywhere you looked with him,
there are fingerprints of intelligence."
Those fingerprints extended back to 1959
when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union.
State Department intelligence officer, Otto Otepka,
had noted the marked increase in the number of Americans
defecting to Russia at that time.
He also noted that some of them came from the military.
He therefore suspected that some of these men
were fake defectors.
They had been assigned by the CIA
to garner intelligence behind the Iron Curtain.
He sent a letter to the CIA asking which ones were real,
and which were their agents.
Oswald was one of the names
on Otepka's list.
Otepka's request was forwarded to James Angleton,
Chief of Counterintelligence.
He instructed that there be no research done on Oswald,
but Otepka continued to work on the Oswald case.
[Lisa Pease] The only thing of significance
was that he was really interested
in Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination.
And he actually had a study of these defectors in his safe.
Well, things got worse. His office was not only bugged,
they planted people in his office, to spy on him.
They started putting confidential documents
in his burn bag, and then trying to blame him
and saying he's burning confidential documents.
The guy's gone, you know, wacko.
[Whoopi Goldberg] As a result, he was formally removed
from the State Department on November the 5th, 1963,
just 17 days before the assassination.
So you will not see Otepka's name in the Warren Report,
and he was not called as a witness before that body.
And in fact, James Angleton, the man who had access
to all the Oswald files at the CIA,
coordinated the agency's response
to the Warren Commission's requests.
-Can you describe the setting up
of the Oswald file at the CIA?
-It could be opened after a few documents
arrived at the CIA from other intelligence agencies,
and that would be enough to trigger the opening
of a 201 file. Sometimes they call it a personality file.
And another thing that could trigger
the opening of a 201 file would be an American citizen
defecting to a communist bloc country.
Well, the interesting thing is,
Oswald met both of those criteria
within nine days of his defection.
And they didn't open a 201 file on him for 13 or 14 months.
Immediately after the defection,
Oswald's threat to commit an act of espionage,
which his words were
"something special about my Marine Corps experience-
which could only be
the U-2, which is a program he'd worked on,
a very secret CIA program-- that threat caused him to be put
on the mail-intercept program and not opening a 201,
at the same time,
which is a very, very unusual combination,
and can only be explained by Oswald being part of
a very covert, very sensitive ongoing operation,
which was the hunt for a mole.
The history of the KGB and the CIA, their wars, uh,
are not actually shooting each other
so much as trying to penetrate each other.
And so we-- we call them moles, or penetrations.
And so, it was an ongoing war; very, very, complicated.
But that's what the mole hunters were doing for Angleton
is looking for KGB moles inside of the CIA.
So, 351 164 was the-- the file in the security office
that was opened up right after his defection.
And that was shared only with Angleton's mole hunting office,
but not with any of the other components of the CIA.
The CIA and the FBI knew
what the KGB would figure out very quickly
was because of his assignment in Atsugi, Japan,
where he tracked the super-secret U-2s at the time.
So once you've established the lure,
the place where you trap the animal
isn't in the Moscow embassy, it's back at Langley
where they thought the mole was.
You want the KGB to contact their mole to ask questions.
The moment that the mole asks a question, it's over.
He or she is-- is exposed.
This program, which did not work, years later,
was put in front of probably our most celebrated
and capable counterintelligence officer
in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.
His name was "Pete" Tennent Bagley.
He began searching for the mole,
he was the key person leading it for years with Angleton.
Well, after he was retired,
he attended a meeting of former CIA officers
down in the Carolinas.
And a British researcher happened to be down there,
his name is Malcolm Blunt, and they met and got along well.
And fortunately for history,
a couple of years before Pete Bagley died,
Malcolm sat down with him one day
and showed him all those first documents
that had come into the CIA on Oswald
from the State Department
and the Navy components at the embassy.
And Pete Bagley looks at Malcolm and he says,
"Was he witting?"
And Malcolm didn't really know how to respond.
And so Bagley raised his voice and insisted,
"He had to be witting! He had to be witting!"
That was a telling, seminal moment
in the history of CIA/KGB spy wars,
in the history of Lee Harvey Oswald.
His early use by the CIA was just a very, very important one
because finally, after all these years,
a very senior CIA officer had just told Malcolm and us
that Lee Harvey Oswald was a witting false defector
when he went to Moscow.
[Goldberg] There was another unusual event
that took place at the time of Oswald's defection--
the source of his income changed.
-Oswald's last quarter of earnings
in the United States, before he defected to the Soviet Union,
should have been paid by the United States Marine Corps.
And they weren't.
Because we asked to see his Marine Corps earnings records
that the Marine Corps deposits
with the Social Security Administration.
They did not pay him any money the last quarter
he was in the United States before his defection.
But no income from the Marine Corps,
when he should have had.
[Goldberg] Could this all be coincidence,
or was Otto Otepka correct in suspecting
Oswald was not a legitimate defector?
And is this why Angleton told his secretary
to withhold information from Otepka?
-The line that the CIA fed the Warren Commission,
we didn't, really didn't know anything about this guy.
We now know that that was complete nonsense.
Oswald was a figure of intense interest
for four years before the assassination,
and a dozen senior CIA officers
were very well acquainted with him.
Everything he did, where he went,
what his politics were, his family life.
I mean, remember, they were reading his mother's mail.
That's how closely they were watching him,
right up until Kennedy was killed.
And then, Kennedy was killed, Oswald's arrested,
and they say, ah, we know nothing about this man.
[Goldberg] In fact, ARRB records show
that James Angleton and the CIA were receiving reports on Oswald
up until one week before the assassination.
The Warren Commission pushed the idea
that Oswald was a staunch communist,
citing evidence of his distributing pro-Castro leaflets
in New Orleans,
and by his supposed defection to Russia in 1959.
But records show that Oswald was working with
fiercely anti-communist elements.
And not surprisingly, many of these groups were known,
and in some cases supported, by the US government.
In the spring of 1963,
Oswald moved from Dallas back to his hometown of New Orleans,
where he began associating with men who,
it would be revealed, had clear connections
with these government efforts.
One of these men, David Ferrie, had been with Oswald
in the Civil Air Patrol back in 1955,
and was known as an extreme anti-communist.
He was also a trainer and a pilot for the CIA
in its secret war against Cuba.
Oswald was involved in these Cuban exile training activities
with Ferrie.
Another person Oswald was seen with in New Orleans in 1963
was Guy Bannister.
Bannister was an extreme right-winger
who was close to the FBI, the CIA,
and the American Nazi Party.
Bannister gave Oswald his own office
at 544 Camp Street.
Oswald now began to use his office
to print up and stamp pro-Castro literature,
much of it associated with the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee centered in New York.
Against their advice, he began a chapter of the FPCC
in New Orleans, of which he was the only member.
-The Fair Play for Cuba committee was created
in April of 1960,
at exactly the same time that President Eisenhower
ordered the creation of a program to overthrow Castro.
Very interesting, the coincidence of those two events.
Oswald had another job working with Guy Bannister
to develop adverse information on political leftists,
or communists or communist sympathizers.
He did this at the universities like Tulane.
So all this stuff in New Orleans that he's doing,
that includes FPCC propaganda and other things, are done to,
very publicly on television, on the radio,
in the streets, uh, of New Orleans
to develop this profile, to establish his bona fides
as a hot-headed pro-Castro supporter.
At some point, the FBI,
I think probably after the assassination,
decided they didn't--
they wanted to disconnect Oswald from the FBI.
And of course, that Bannister, who's associated with the FBI,
would have to be disconnected as well.
The problem with that, many of those handbills
had the 544 Camp Street address on them.
There was a message from New Orleans to the Bureau
written by Special Agent Maynor, who actually mentioned
pamphlets that had the 544 Camp Street address on it.
And before that message was sent,
it was scratched out.
[Goldberg] After the assassination,
when the FBI questioned Bannister,
a former FBI agent himself,
they did not ask him about Oswald.
One of the places Oswald leafleted in front of
was Clay Shaw's International Trade Mart.
Shaw, who was arrested by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison
on charges that he was part of the conspiracy
to kill President Kennedy,
always denied he was associated with the CIA.
[interviewer] "You have never, yourself,
had any CIA connection?"
-"None whatsoever."
[interviewer] "Any association with the organization?"
-"No, none."
[Goldberg] The Review Board has shown
these denials to be false.
Shaw was both a highly valued contract agent
and had a covert security clearance
for a project codename QKENCHANT.
New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews
had worked with Oswald in May of '63 in an attempt
to upgrade his military
discharge from its undesirable status.
After the assassination,
a man calling himself Clay Bertrand phoned Andrews
and asked him to consider going to Dallas to defend Oswald.
Under oath, Clay Shaw denied that he was Clay Bertrand.
And Andrews claimed that because of medication he was on,
he had only imagined the phone call.
But today, because of the work
of the Assassination Records Review Board, we now have
evidence and 12 people who confirm
that Shaw used this name as an alias.
Andrews later admitted that Shaw was Bertrand
to author Harold Weisberg, but made him promise
not to reveal this until after Andrews' death.
Evidence of another aspect of Oswald's time in New Orleans
is supported by Robert Tanenbaum,
the Deputy Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee,
and others who have seen film of Oswald, David Ferrie,
and CIA director of Cuban Operations David Atlee Phillips
at anti-Castro training camps.
Phillips was a propaganda specialist,
and his tactics to neutralize the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
included infiltration, surveillance,
and recruitment of other agent provocateurs.
David Phillips also created an anti-Castro Cuban exile group.
The Student Revolutionary Directorate, or DRE,
was based in Miami, and had a chapter in New Orleans
led by Carlos Bringuier.
Records released by the ARRB
show the CIA was funding this group
and helped plan activities, including the attack
on a Cuban hotel which housed Soviet advisers.
[Jefferson Morley] AMSPELL was the CIA's code name
for the Cuban Student Directorate.
The name doesn't appear
in the final report of the Warren Commission.
They certainly did not know that the group was receiving
51,000 dollars a month from the CIA in 1963,
and they didn't know that the group was being run from Miami
by George Joannides,
a psychological warfare officer,
who reported directly to Dick Helms.
The DRE published the first JFK conspiracy theory
saying that Oswald and Castro were the presumed assassins.
and that publication was paid for by the CIA
under the auspices of George Joannides.
The Joannides story tells us
that Dick Helms' hand-picked man in Miami
was controlling the group that had the most to do with Oswald
before and after the assassination.
I found out Joannides' identity many years later,
and I went to Bob Blakey,
the head of the HSCA investigation,
and I said, "Bob, did you ever know this guy Joannides?"
And he said, "Yeah, you know, we dealt with him a lot,
he was the liaison."
And I said, "Did you know what he was doing in 1963?"
And he said, "He wasn't doing anything in 1963.
We had an agreement with the CIA
that nobody who was operational at the time of the assassination
would be involved in the investigation."
And I said, "Bob, think again.
Joannides was running those Cubans
who were in touch with Oswald.
He was running the Cubans who were blaming Castro
for the assassination.
And then he came along, and he stonewalled you."
The reason why they brought Joannides in to do it
was to hide the connection to Oswald.
He was definitely shocked
because he saw just how clever they had been.
They had gone right to the heart of his investigation,
and figured out how to paralyze it.
[Dan Hardway] I no longer trust anything
that the agency has told us in regard to the assassination.
It lied to the Warren Commission.
It lied to the ARRB.
It lied to the HSCA in admitting that Joannides was employed
in a covert capacity as liaison to the HSCA.
It has admitted that it violated its charter,
and ran a domestic covert operation
aimed at subverting the HSCA and its investigation.
[Jefferson Morley] On the night of the assassination,
the spokesman for the DRE in Miami got on the phone
and started telling reporters,
"We know all about the guy who killed the president."
And they talked to 10 or 15 reporters that night.
So the CIA's propaganda assets shaped the story
from the first hours after Kennedy was dead.
[Goldberg] Even the Assassination
Records Review Board
had trouble getting documents from government agencies.
In late 1992, a month after the Records Act
was passed, the Secret Service
began its compliance plan, but by January
of 1995, it had begun destroying important documents.
-And they destroyed a group of records
which involved threats to President Kennedy
in the fall of 1963.
They have what are called threat sheets.
And there were many threats made to President Kennedy's life
during the year 1963.
They fought us on release of those records,
they even enlisted Vice President Gore's wife
to help them because she had a very legitimate concern
for mental health records.
And the idea was that this might disclose
the names of people who had mental health problems.
In the end, when we required agencies to disclose,
to swear under oath that they had located
all assassination records,
and had turned everything over to us,
the Secret Service refused to sign the document under oath.
I think that was telling.
-The destruction of records is actually referenced in the,
uh, Assassination Records Review Board final report.
A very, um, very disappointing.
They were records that related to trips
that President Kennedy had taken in the fall of 1963
prior to him going to Dallas.
In the FBI, uh, a stop or flash was placed on Oswald's files,
which meant that no one could ask for a document
in those files, or no one could even
add a document to those files, without going through
the FBI's espionage division.
And that lasted for four years.
It was essentially a blinking red light
on Oswald's files at FBI.
On 8 October 1963,
an FBI agent whose name was Marvin Gheesling
took that status off of Oswald's files.
He dropped the flag on Oswald's files.
What that action did was to lower Oswald's threat profile
at the FBI just weeks before the Kennedy assassination.
And what that would mean is there was no reason
to put Oswald's name on the security index.
One thing about the security index is
when you have a presidential motorcade
going through a particular route,
anybody who's on that index
has to be removed from where they are.
They cannot be on the parade route.
That action at the FBI didn't happen in isolation.
The same thing happened at CIA at exactly the same time.
And of course, it exposes the president
to a dangerous situation that he shouldn't have been.
[Goldberg] Few people knew that there had been
at least two prior plots to kill President Kennedy in 1963.
One was in Chicago on November 2nd.
The second one was in Tampa on November 18th.
-Kennedy ended up not going to Chicago.
Tell us about that plot.
-An informant, on October 31,
an informant named Lee,
who could have been Lee Harvey Oswald,
gave a warning to the FBI stating that four Cubans
were headed to Chicago to shoot Kennedy.
The following day, a landlady reported to the Chicago police
that she had rented a room to four people
that had rifles with telescopic sights,
and a sketch of the motorcade.
The FBI passed that on to the Secret Service.
And the Secret Service botched the surveillance
of these four individuals.
Two of them escaped, but they actually picked up
two of the snipers, and they detained them.
They were stonewalled by the snipers.
They didn't get any information out of them.
While this was goin' on,
there was another threat coming in from
another alternate patsy named Thomas Arthur Vallee,
who was making open and loud threats
that he would assassinate Kennedy.
They only picked him up when Kennedy canceled
his trip on November 2nd at 10 in the morning.
One day before the trip,
the Diem brothers had been assassinated.
And that was the stated reason
for the cancellation of the trip to Chicago.
What you found in Vallee, and the whole Chicago plot,
is so many similarities to what eventually happened in Dallas
that it-- it can't be considered coincidental.
Vallee, if we compare him to Oswald, is an ex-Marine.
He had been posted like Oswald in the
Far East on a station that was linked to the CIA
because there were U-2 surveillance planes on it.
It was easy to portray him as disgruntled, anti-Kennedy,
a loner, armed.
He had another intelligence link that he shared with
Oswald in that he trained Cuban exiles for combat, which was
a CIA responsibility.
And Oswald, we know, at least offered to do that.
He most likely did train Cuban exiles,
but we know he tried to. Oswald, as we know,
was moved from New Orleans to Dallas in October
to be there just at the right time for the motorcade.
And he's placed in a tall building
where he gets a job,
he's adjacent to the perfect kill zone.
Now, if we look at what happened to, uh, Vallee,
he's moved like a pawn in August from Long Island to Chicago
to be in there in time for the motorcade.
And where does he get a job?
In a tall building adjacent to the motorcade
with a perfect view of a, uh, kill zone.
It would have forced Kennedy's motorcade to do a sharp turn,
slow down and be in a point
where you could have had perfect triangulation of fire.
-And what about the trip to Florida?
-On November 18th, Kennedy was scheduled to do
a 27 mile-long motorcade in Tampa.
The Secret Service was very nervous
about the Floridian Hotel
where the motorcade would have gone by.
It would have forced a sharp turn.
Nobody fired away at him.
But in this case, the alternate patsy
would have been a Gilbert Policarpo Lopez.
He was a Cuban exile.
He, uh, attended
Fair Play for Cuba Committee meetings.
One day after the assassination, on November 23rd,
he makes his way to Mexico City.
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee loaned him money for his travel,
and he ends up being the lone passenger
on an airplane to Cuba.
The CIA, they found out
about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,
the weird trip to Mexico City, the fact that he was
a lone passenger on a plane to, uh, Cuba.
And they didn't pass on the information
to the Warren Commission.
So when the HSCA found out about this lead
that wasn't pursued, even they called it egregious.
-And what do you think was the relevance of it?
-Well, if he had been assassinated in Tampa, Lopez,
he would have been the potential patsy.
If they had to admit to a front shot,
because Oswald was behind, there were rumors
that he had assisted Oswald in the assassination in Dallas.
-Had anyone, anyone tried to speak to
the Warren Commission about these incidents?
[Paul Bleau] Abraham Bolden was the first Black
Secret Service agent assigned to the White House detail,
and he was handpicked by Kennedy.
He was in Chicago, uh, when this plot went down.
So he was there when the Secret Service
was briefed about the four snipers,
and he witnessed how much the security was lax for Chicago.
And he also witnessed, after the assassination,
the steps that were taken
to keep the Chicago plot completely secret.
No paper trail, compartmentalized,
agents ordered to keep silent about it.
This information did not make its way to Secret Service agents
that were protecting Kennedy for future motorcades,
including Dallas.
[Goldberg] Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore
was aware of Agent Bolden and the Chicago plot.
-I met with Elmer three times face-to-face.
Several phone calls, very short. One very long one.
I first asked him, "Did you ever interview
Thomas Arthur Vallee?"
And he said, "Oh, Washington wouldn't
let me see the files on that."
I said, "Oh, well, what about a man,
a Secret Service agent by the name of Abraham Bolden?"
His demeanor completely changed.
He stood up from his chair.
He pulled out his revolver and he put it on the table,
right in front of me.
He leaned over the table, and he says,
"Jim, tell me right now, who are you working for?"
I said, "I'm an independent researcher."
He told me
in a very loud voice,
and with a very stern look on his face,
"That goddamned lying nigger. We finally got him."
I said, "You got him?" He says, "No."
He said, "Kelley and the chief got him."
I think that, uh,
Moore and the rest of his crew
were scared speechless that Bolden knew somethin'.
[Paul Bleau] Abraham Bolden was one person
who did try to say what he knew to the Warren Commission,
but they blocked him. He was blocked from talking
and eventually railroaded into some phony crime
and put into jail for a number of years.
[Jim Gochenaur] Moore leaned back in his big
comfortable leather chair,
and he said, "Who killed Jack Kennedy?"
Then he said, "Well, I'll tell you who didn't.
With 100 percent certainty. It wasn't the Russians."
And my head is starting to swim.
I wanted to break in right at that point, but then he said,
"I'll tell you why--
JFK was the Russians' boy.
He was giving away everything he could.
That the man, for all intents and purposes," he says,
"Dare I say it?
Jim, I will say it, JFK was a traitor."
[Oliver Stone] The ghost of John Kennedy
would turn over in his grave
at these cruel words. But the truth is,
the competing narrative of his life and death,
as told us by Allen Dulles and his ilk--
of a leftist assassin killing a president
with three shots from a sixth-floor window--
has won the day
and continues as the official story.
But, the ghost will not be appeased.
[Donald Sutherland] After the Bay of Pigs debacle,
JFK began to use his brother Bobby
as a foreign policy advisor.
Bobby was influential in the decision to fire Allen Dulles.
He then figured as an important advisor
during the Berlin confrontation, on Vietnam,
in both 1961 and '63, and during the Missile Crisis.
-Uh, after the Cuban Missile Crisis,
wasn't President Kennedy attempting a back channel
with Russia and Cuba, and your father was aware of it?
-Jack had an intense interest in Cuban history
and all the history of Latin America.
And he-- he believed that Castro had a point,
in fact he sent a message to Castro
that he read and admired Castro's declaration
at the Sierra Maestra
about the liberation of Cuba and the--
the right of the Cuban people to exercise sovereignty
over their nation, and over their island.
The message that he sent through Lisa Howard and Attwood
was a message that
"We don't care if you're communists.
We don't care if you're Marxists.
We don't care what kind of government
that you experiment with.
The only thing we care about is that you don't make your island
a platform for Soviet aggression in the hemisphere.
And that you stop your campaign
against the Alliance for Progress nations,
against the Social Democrats,
Betancourt in Venezuela, Lleras Camargo in Colombia,
people who really were trying to democratize their country
and develop fair systems for the poor.
By '62, President Kennedy was actively engaged
with Khrushchev, and they had a secret
exchange of 26 letters with each other.
And they were operating through back channels,
because both of them found themselves
in identical positions, um, surrounded by war hawks,
surrounded by a bellicose intelligence
military establishment, and all of them viewing
all-out thermonuclear war, not only as inevitable,
but in some cases, desirable.
The first of those letters was smuggled by Khrushchev
through a KGB spy named Georgi Bolshakov.
Georgi was a friend of my parents.
My uncle wrote the first of his from Cape Cod,
and he talked about how his children and their cousins,
which meant us, were playing in the yard,
and that these two leaders had no right to bring the world
to a crisis that would destroy children like us
who had no political involvement.
And the millions of other people around the world
who would be destroyed.
And that it would be their failure and their sin
if they allowed that to happen.
And they proceeded along a course
that ended up with them really talking very seriously
about complete demobilization.
And Khrushchev's career was,
um, it was ended by that as well.
-Among the many traits
the peoples of our two countries have in common,
none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.
Almost unique among the major world powers,
we have never been at war with each other.
[Lisa Pease] Norman Cousins,
who was then the editor of the Saturday Review,
had gotten a meeting with Khrushchev.
And so Norman Cousins goes to Kennedy, and he said,
"Let's talk about antinuclear plans.
Let's see if we can, you know,
go for some sort of form of disarmament."
He's like, "What can I say as to your level of commitment?"
And Kennedy's like, "I'm 100 percent committed
to disarming our nukes."
And that was very difficult because, again,
there are hardliners on both sides.
And so, they ended up with the Limited Test Ban Treaty
where they banned all above-ground testing.
But that's what came of that meeting,
is that conversation. But when he came back,
he also said, "Khrushchev's gonna need a real sign from you
that you're really committed to this."
-And of course, this became very eloquently real
in June of 1963, when Kennedy gives the famous "peace speech"
as it came to be known, at American University.
-I realize the pursuit of peace
is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war.
And every graduate of this school,
every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war,
and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward,
by examining his own attitude
towards the possibilities of peace,
towards the Soviet Union,
towards the course of the Cold War,
and towards freedom and peace here at home.
First, examine our attitude towards peace itself.
Too many of us think it is impossible,
too many think it is unreal.
But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief.
It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable.
That mankind is doomed.
That we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
-I think Mr. Kennedy has done some significant things
in civil rights, and I would include the attorney general.
I think, uh, both of these men are men of genuine good will.
And, uh, I think there is a necessity now to
seize the urgency of the moment.
[Oliver Stone] Although we've focused
primarily on foreign policy,
we cannot overlook Kennedy's battles in the South
with Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi
and, in that June of '63,
with Governor George Wallace of Alabama.
[George Wallace] And I'm asking from you
an unequivocal assurance
that you will not bar entry to these students.
And that you will step aside, peacefully,
do your constitutional duty.
[Oliver Stone] In both showdowns,
using federal troops,
the Kennedy Administration won admission of Black students
to the last public colleges in the South.
George Wallace made it clear that this fight was not over.
-And-- and-- and-- and the-- the South this year,
next year, will decide who the next president is.
Whoever the South votes for is the president.
And you're gonna see that the South is wanting
to be against some folks.
[Oliver Stone] That night, Kennedy addressed the nation
in what many consider the finest presidential speech
on civil rights since Abraham Lincoln.
-And that the rights of every man are diminished,
when the rights of one man are threatened.
Even America, because his skin is dark,
cannot enjoy the full and free life,
which all of us want.
Then who among us would be content to have
the color of his skin changed?
One hundred years of delay have passed
since President Lincoln freed the slaves,
yet their heirs, their grandsons,
are not fully free.
And this nation, for all its hopes,
and all its folks, will not be fully free,
until all its citizens are free.
We face, therefore, a moral crisis,
as a country and a people.
And this is a matter which concerns this country,
and what it stands for.
And in meeting it,
I ask the support of all of our citizens.
Thank you very much.
[Sutherland] By the fall of 1963,
Kennedy had made many enemies.
He was working on an American withdrawal from Vietnam,
an upcoming state visit to Indonesia in '64,
an independent, unified democracy in the Congo.
Through Nasser, a balanced policy in the Middle East.
Normalization of relations with Cuba.
And a detente with Russia--
even going so far as to offer them
a joint mission to the moon.
But on November 22nd,
another face of America asserted itself.
[reporter] Several thousand enthusiastic Texans are on hand
to give the President and Mrs. Kennedy a warm welcome.
[Sutherland] On that day the world changed.
Lyndon Johnson did not have the understanding
of Third World countries,
nor did he have the anti-colonial sympathies
that President Kennedy had.
Therefore, numerous changes in foreign policy took place
within a short period of time after the assassination.
-President Johnson did a 180-degree turn
in terms of Congo policy.
The US, which under Kennedy,
was a champion of African nationalism
and the lead peacekeeper in the Congo,
becomes the agent of white reactionary nationalism
and imperialism led by
the Belgians and the South Africans,
and of all things, the anti-Castro Cubans.
[rapid gunfire]
[Sutherland] The CIA now began
to furnish planes and Cuban exile pilots
to fly sorties to stamp out the rebellion.
According to one pilot, the CIA manned the embassy,
and brought members of a secret operation
from the Bay of Pigs codenamed Operation 40.
-All of whom mount this operation
to return a reactionary government to power
under Joseph Mobutu, and to bring Moise Tshombe,
who was the secessionist leader of Katanga
back in as prime minister.
And it was as if the United States had never really had,
you know, this deep association with African nationalism
under President Kennedy.
[Sutherland] Joseph Mobutu became
the front man for imperial forces,
profiting in the billions from the riches of the Congo.
The Congo never recovered from the assassination of Lumumba.
And today, despite its natural resources,
it is considered a failed state
where 80 percent of the population
live in abject poverty.
Like Foster Dulles,
Johnson now favored Saudi Arabia over Egypt,
and greatly favored Israel in the Middle East.
The fairness and even-handedness Kennedy was building was lost.
In 1968, when Johnson learned Israel had acquired
atomic weapons, he made the decision
to order CIA director Richard Helms
not to tell the Pentagon or the State Department.
In 1973, while Egyptian tanks
were crossing the Sinai
during the Yom Kippur War, Commander Moshe Dayan
proposed the use of nuclear weapons.
Kennedy's goals of peace through alliances with moderates,
and a solution for
the Palestinian refugee problem,
were abandoned.
In Latin America, JFK's Alliance for Progress,
a program promoting economic development,
suffered as well under Johnson.
In 1964, Johnson said,
you could take all the gold in Fort Knox,
and it would just go down the drain in Latin America
unless the private investor could have some confidence
that he could make his investment,
and it would not be confiscated.
Johnson's private investment idea
broke with Kennedy's policy, which was to make
most of the loans out of the United States Treasury,
thereby charging little or
no interest.
Under Johnson's leadership,
the future allotments for '67 to '69 were reduced
and much of it was shifted to military programs.
By 1973, it was eliminated.
Under Secretary of State George Ball referred to
the island archipelago of Indonesia
as the true breaking point in Asia--
more important to the United States than Vietnam.
-What were some of Kennedy's plans for Indonesia after 1964?
-Three days before Kennedy was killed,
he signed an 11-million dollar aid package that included,
you know, not just military weapons--
because that's something they hadn't been willing
to provide before Kennedy, and Kennedy knew, look,
if we don't give them the weapons,
they're just gonna go get them from the Soviets.
So he did agree to that.
But Kennedy wanted to emphasize roads, infrastructure,
education, you know, money for food,
money to help levee places and create rice paddies.
Kennedy wanted to help Indonesia become self-sufficient.
[Bradley Simpson] President Johnson
had a visceral dislike of Sukarno
that led him to conclude that he didn't want to spend
any political capital attempting to appeal to a leader
that he viewed as a regional bully.
So Sukarno bitterly criticized the US war in Vietnam.
He signaled that he was going to pursue
a radical, anti-colonial foreign policy
that the Johnson administration saw as a direct threat
to American interests,
and something that had to be stopped.
The US State Department signaled to the Indonesian army
that overthrowing Sukarno
and killing lots and lots of communists
would produce a political payoff.
[Sutherland] September 30th, 1965.
Following rumors of a suspected military coup against Sukarno,
leftist officers tried to bring the disloyal generals to trial.
Their plan quickly descended into chaos,
and General Suharto took control.
The Indonesian army, with CIA support,
blamed the killing of the generals on the communist party.
General Suharto then used this as a pretext
to turn the army on the communists,
and eventually neutralized President Sukarno,
taking his place as president.
-Five hundred thousand, at least, were killed,
people that were identified as communists,
whether they were or not,
whether they even knew what communism was or not.
If their name was on a list, they were killed.
-And this is the most consequential legacy
of President Kennedy's assassination.
The coming to power of a president
who not only didn't care about Indonesia,
but who surrounded himself with officials,
who had a stake in a far more confrontational approach
towards Indonesia that ultimately resulted in
a spasm of mass killing in which nearly half a million
unarmed civilians were killed by the Indonesian army.
[Sutherland] Regarding Vietnam,
a review of the declassified record
shows that Kennedy continuously pushed back against the Pentagon
by refusing every request to commit combat troops there.
This conflict is reflected
in a National Security Action Memorandum-NSAM 273.
Drafted in the days before his death, in its final form,
it allowed for direct American involvement in Vietnam.
[John Newman] McGeorge Bundy,
who's the national security adviser,
puts together a memo, uh, based upon the--
the truth about the war, which is it's going terribly.
And he does it in a way to try and make sure
that Kennedy would be able to go along with it.
So the way he writes the first draft of 273
is to say, look, we need to intensify the war effort
against the communists. But the way we're gonna do it
is to increase South Vietnamese forces.
There's not a word about American forces
or Americanizing the war.
[Sutherland] In fact, after much maneuvering,
Kennedy, Bundy,
and Secretary of Defense McNamara
had already settled on a plan to withdraw 1,000 US troops
by 1963, with the goal of having South Vietnam
responsible for its own combat operations.
[John Newman] While Kennedy's body is still in the casket
in the rotunda over on the Capitol building
is when Johnson changes NSAM 273 to a new version.
It's Sunday, and McGeorge Bundy has to take the old version
around town, and show it to Rusk
and show it to all the principals and get their input.
And when it comes to the key paragraph, paragraph 7,
which talks about how we're going to intensify the war,
all of a sudden, the restrictions
that McGeorge Bundy had put on that,
instead of changing a few words,
there's two big hash marks through that paragraph,
and it's completely rewritten.
And I asked Bundy in an interview, I said,
"Who told you to do that?" He said, "Johnson did."
[Sutherland] In the Review Board's declassifications,
there is evidence that Johnson was fully aware
of Kennedy's Vietnam withdrawal plans,
disagreed with them, and worked on Robert McNamara
to make him renounce them.
-McNamara came into this, um, the decision
to withdraw US forces, and in my view,
he implemented it faithfully
until the time that Kennedy was killed.
[Sutherland] These changes allowed the US
to unilaterally engage in combat in Vietnam,
rather than simply supporting and advising
South Vietnamese troops,
which led to serious consequences.
-And within days, we're talking about
sending out the De Soto missions, these--
these naval excursions along the coastline of North Vietnam.
That ends up with the Maddox and--
and the so-called Tonkin,
Gulf, uh, attacks and then the resolution in Congress
opening the door to intervention in Vietnam.
-In retaliation for this unprovoked attack
on the high seas,
our forces have struck the bases
used by the North Vietnamese patrol craft.
-But the new news there is,
it wasn't Johnson who first figured out, you know,
the day after Kennedy was shot,
that he needed to change this NSAM.
He just rubber stamped what
Taylor had been doing covertly ever since NSAM 263.
[Sutherland] And, as declassified memos
have revealed, by autumn of 1964,
during his campaign against Barry Goldwater,
Johnson had already decided
that he was going to escalate the Vietnam War.
In fact, the directive
that would become the Tonkin Gulf Resolution
had been written before the Tonkin Gulf incident itself.
-We are not about to send American boys
nine or 10,000 miles away from home
to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
[Sutherland] On August 7th,
three months before the election,
Johnson had already planned for an extensive air war.
It was to begin after his inauguration.
[Lyndon Johnson] We intend to convince the communists
that we cannot be defeated by force of arms,
or by superior power.
-And no nation in the history of battle
ever suffered more than the Soviet Union
in the Second World War.
At least 20 million lost their lives.
Countless millions of homes and families
were burned or sacked.
A third of the nation's territory,
including two thirds of its industrial base,
was turned into a wasteland.
A loss equivalent to the destruction of this country
east of Chicago.
[Sutherland] After his brother's death,
Robert Kennedy knew
that relations with the Soviet Union
hung in the balance.
-On November 29th, he--
which is one week after the assassination,
my father, he had a meeting with Bill Walton,
who was a friend of the family and was on a--
it was a cultural trip to the Soviet Union.
And he asked Walton to convey a message through Georgi Bolshakov
to Premier Khrushchev,
saying that our family knew that the Soviets
were not involved in the assassination,
that it was a right wing plot from our own country.
-In other words, the CIA, or forces aligned with the CIA.
They said they also believed that Bobby Kennedy
intended to run for office, and that eventually
he would get back to the White House.
And when he did, he planned to resume his brother's policies
of detente and peace with the Soviet Union.
But they had to bide their time,
and wait for that political opportunity.
This is a stunning message to be delivering to Bolshakov,
because, of course,
Bolshakov is going to take this right to the Kremlin.
[Sutherland] When Khrushchev paid his respects
to President Kennedy at the American Embassy,
he was reportedly holding back tears.
Castro got the news of Kennedy's death
while discussing detente
with the French journalist, Jean Daniel.
He then exclaimed, "This is bad news.
Everything is now going to change."
Like Bobby Kennedy, neither man
believed the conclusions of the Warren Report.
[Lisa Pease] When news came of Kennedy's death,
all over the planet, people were mourning and crying
and going to embassies.
In Latin America, people just lit candles
because they didn't even have electrical power.
But they wanted to honor his killing.
In the Yucatan Peninsula, peasants cleared an area
and planted a peace garden.
[Philip Muehlenbeck] Nasser learned of Kennedy's death
in the middle of the night.
He got up, dressed,
went down to his office and then realized,
well, there's nothing I can do about this.
According to his son, Nasser went into, uh, a great,
uh, state of depression after Kennedy's death.
Uh, relations with Egypt gradually deteriorated,
and they increasingly shifted their allegiance
towards the Soviet Union as well.
-A mass was held in the leading
Catholic Church in Cairo, which has a capacity of 600.
They somehow fit 4,000 people into that church.
Algeria, which had a special feeling for Kennedy,
declared a state of mourning for a week.
Flags were flown at half-mast.
The US ambassador to Egypt said
that he thought the Egyptians had seen in Kennedy
the best of what they saw in Americans,
that Kennedy had represented a kind of ideal of America
to ordinary Egyptians.
-They polled historians, they polled the American people
to say who are the most popular presidents.
One metric that you can use to, objectively at least,
judge their foreign policy is how many boulevards
are named after that president
in foreign countries,
how many hospitals, how many colleges,
how many schools,
how many statues are-- are standing of that president
in capitols all over the world?
And in that sense, President Kennedy
beats every other president hands-down.
[Sutherland] That feeling is not held only abroad.
Many people at home felt that after Kennedy's death,
a period of depression and cynicism overtook the country,
and that America was somehow changed forever.
Our overwhelming disbelief
in the Warren Commission's findings
contributed to increased skepticism
of all our foundational beliefs about government.
-I think there's a direct thread between the events of 1963,
and the kind of horror show
that America is having to endure right now.
And I think once you kill a president in broad daylight
on the streets of an American city,
and everyone knows that powerful forces did it,
and it can never be solved, that crime,
that sends a signal, not only to the American people,
but to the American media, to American future leaders.
And if America really wants a democratic society,
then we should get to the bottom of this traumatic crime
that continues to reverberate throughout American history.
[Sutherland] The Assassination
Records Review Board made many startling discoveries
in the four years of its existence.
In October of 2017, in compliance with
the JFK Records Act 25-year deadline,
President Trump said
unless he was in receipt of further information,
he would not block declassification
of the last of the files.
Six months later,
he postponed releasing the last batch,
which the Review Board
had previously delayed from 1998.
This means that 56 years later,
the US government is still maintaining secrets
about the JFK case.
Can a democracy survive if it does not know
its deepest secrets about the darkest days of its past?
-Do you think there was any connection
between your father's assassination and your uncle's?
-I don't think anybody has connected all the dots.
There are dots there.
There are dots that look like certainly, um, that are,
uh, that we should be investigating.
And my father's death has never been investigated properly.
[cheering]
[Robert Kennedy] Because I think we can do better.
And I think we can do better around the rest of the globe.
I'm not going to be satisfied until that war is over,
and American soldiers are brought back in.
[cheering]
-I have therefore chosen this time and place
to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds,
and the truth too rarely perceived,
and that is the most important topic on Earth: Peace.
What kind of a peace do I mean,
and what kind of a peace do we seek?
Not a Pax Americana,
enforced on the world by American weapons of war,
not the peace of the grave,
or the security of the slave.
I am talking about genuine peace,
the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living,
and the kind that enables men and nations to grow
and to hope
and build a better life for their children,
not merely peace for Americans,
but peace for all men and women.
Not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time.
[♪♪♪]