Oswald – Audibly Speaking: A Site of History and Memory

In this series, we look at the periods in Lee Harvey Oswald’s life, chunk by chunk, which show an assassin in the making. No matter how you sort them, no matter the chronological order in which you take their measure, there can be only one conclusion. That is that the making of Lee Oswald was, step by step, the making of the man who could, and did, assassinate President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.  In this episode, we look at the last six months on 1962, when Oswald returned from the Soviet Union, and the disintegration began that led him...

We lost Ruth Paine this year on August 31.  Ruth was a great lady, one of the few heroes and persons of kindness in the run-up and the aftermath of the JFK assassination.  As Thomas Mallon has noted, we know so much about the moods, mind and appearances of Lee Harvey Oswald in the critical six weeks before the assassination because Oswald sometimes stayed at Ruth’s house, used Ruth’s typerwriter, and visited Ruth’s home the night before the assassination to retrieve something from her garage that she did not know was there: the rifle that Oswald used to kill...

Today, Sunday, November 10, 2023, I reflect on the events of Veterans Day Weekend 1963, when JFK and Oswald lived out their last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, November 10-12, 1963. We review what we know of those fateful days. Next, I talk about the events of Wednesday, November 13 through Friday, November 22, 1963, to … Continue reading NEW! 2024 Repeats the 1963 Calendar: JFK, Oswald and Veterans Day Weekend, From Sunday, November 10 to Tuesday, November 12 →

Listen to this audio version of my Youtube video explaining the “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination, and WHY IT IS TRUE.  Many conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination discredit themselves by disputing this thrice-confirmed theory first revealed by the Warren Commission in 1964.

Motive.  It is the thing that all juries want but do not need, in our system of justice, to determine guilt or innocence, The Warren Commission did not hazard a hypothesis on the question of Oswald’s motive, seen singularly.  But they did list a series of potential motives, seeded by his early life, and seen by his comments and those of others, that might have played a part in the formation of motive.  Here I summarize this penultimate chapter in The Warren Report, and argue that there is much to praise and much to critique about the Commission’s handl...

Continuing our summary of The Warren Report investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we come to Chapter Five.  The whole tenor of the investigation changed with the subject of this chapter.  It concerned the events that led to the federalization of the investigation itself, the violation of Oswald’s civil liberties in the Dallas jail climaxing in the assassination of Oswald himself by Jack Ruby during the transfer of Oswald from one jail to another.  The events of this chapter transformed the assassination from something seemingly weird to something seemingly unbelievable. In this summary, host Rick Reima...

A recent podcast episode by the excellent historians of the JFK assassination, Gerald Posner and Fred Litwin, prompted this podcast episode of mine. Given the need to speculate about so much that is important about the behavior of Oswald on November 21 (pre-assassination) and November 33 (post-assassination), is it possible to employ speculation as a technique for getting at the truth of why Oswald assassinated JFK, and what his post-assassination purposes might have been?  Can informed speculation ever rise to the level of good evidence?  And if so, what are the standards that such evidence must meet to achieve this state? Qu...

It’s core findings remain untouched.  Its conclusions have stood the test of time. In this episode we see the tour de force that lies at the foundation of this seminal chapter in The Warren Report: Chapter Three.  While subsequent research has expanded on the insights we gain from this chapter, which distilled the most important work of the Warren Commission, nothing has seriously contradicted its fundamental conclusion. What has deteriorated is not the Warren Report conclusions. No, those have stood the test of time.  What has deteriorated is the American people’s ability to separate fact from fiction and to...

Today I summarize the Warren Report’s Chapter Two, “The Assassination.” It is a chapter that promises much but really delivers less than meets the eye.  Focusing on the details that form the background of the assassination, and continuing by trading in the shadowlands of lacunae about the event, chapter two is a mere overture to the real opera of the assassination, the fireworks that begin with Chapter Three, “The Shots from the Texas School Depository.”  Stay tuned for that chapter in our next summary episode on Audibly Speaking.

The Warren Commission’s Warren Report, at 888 pages, is a long slog.  For those for whom it is too long, I begin here a series of summaries of each of the chapters in the Report.  Each chapter exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of the Commission’s investigations.  The Commission’s faults can be exaggerated and it accomplishments overlooked.  This series opens with “Summary and Conclusions,” including one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial, sentence in the entire Warren Report.

We have an intermission episode in this series on the JFK assassination, with a personal view of the memories of the host on the assassination and why he was not taken in by conspiracy theories, in contrast to so many of his boomer cohorts along the way.

Today, Audibly Speaking reviews the magisterial book by famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  We revisit the things that make it unique and utterly unanswerable as a riposte to the crazy conspiracy theories that still pollute the writings about the 35th US President.

In this sidebar episode tracing the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and we step back from the forest to examine the trees of the story. In this politically portentous year of 2024, learn what the conspiracy nonsense can do to help us save American democracy. And begin to learn why the strengths of the Warren … Continue reading Why is the JFK Assassination Still Relevant? And Why is the Warren Commission’s Still Strong? Listen to One of My Best →

Why did Lee Harvey Oswald go east from his boarding house in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, only to go west before his fatal encounter with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963? The only possible answer was that his plans must have changed, along with his destination, at least temporarily. Ironically, however, his confrontation with Tippit, murderous though it was, may not have changed his destination at all, because he continued his journey west in its wake. An advertisement in the Dallas Morning News, never examined until now, may explain this mystery, as I explain in this...

We have now arrived at the critical moments.  What happened as the assassination occurred and what do we know of Oswald’s behavior during these most important of minutes? It turns out we know a great deal–so much in fact that we can even infer what was going on in Oswald’s mind on a minute by minute basis.  In this episode, we also speculate about the most mysterious of all questions. Where was Oswald going when he left his boarding house after the assassination? Here we engage in informed speculation, with an emphasis on the word “informed.”

How to help students understand the overwhelming evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald (and Oswald alone)?  Given the power of the evidence, no help ought be needed! Perhaps a concise run-through will do the trick?  Or a solemn and stately documentary? In a time when facts alone hold no sway, what is an historian to do? The answer is to marshal the evidence one more time, always one more time, until the bell, at long last, rings.  Even though it has been clanging now for more than sixty years, let up look at a day in the life of Oswald, the...

What was Lee Harvey Oswald up to in New Orleans between his failed assassination attempt against Retired General Edwin Walker in April 1963 and his trip to Mexico City in late September in pursuit of a visa to Communist Cuba?  What was the mix of motives that drove Oswald in these critical months prior to … Continue reading Lee Harvey Oswald and Edwin Walker Redux: Resume Building and Plotting in New Orleans, April to October 1963 →

In this final part of the three-part podcast series, we look at Oswald’s interior concerns in the days and hours before 12:30 pm CST on November 22, 1963.  In so doing we elucidate the most elusive of questions, the question of motive.

This is your host, historian Rick Reiman.  Go to my YouTube Channel, “JFK Demystified,” to view the first episode of a series of short videos called “On Background: Seeking the Hidden JFK Assassination.”  The series is on the evidence that is hiding in plain sight, namely the factors that block our view from the evidence that makes the assassination a simple thing to understand.  We look at the confusion regarding standards of evidence and proof, the con-men- conspiracy theories that lead people astray, the historical context that sends us back to the real world, and the accumulated evidence confirmed again and a...

Continuing the series of JFK assassination episodes in this, the 60th year since the assassination, we look not at the thinking of the CIA, FBI, Warren Commission, Mob, Cuba, Russia or any of the other institutions that have been falsely imagined as being behind it, but inside the mind of the man who actually did it, and did it alone: Lee Harvey Oswald.  It may not be the most popular theory, but facts don’t have to be popular. They only need to be true.  This is an essay by myself, Rick Reiman, and narrated by myself, in response to t...

Today, your host on Audiblyspeaking, Dr. Rick Reiman narrates his assessment of this year’s surprising news in the JFK assassination folklore: the claim by former secret service agent Paul Landis that he found a backseat bullet that allegedly refutes the famous “single bullet theory.”  The subtitle of today’s show might appropriately be, “Not so Fast.”