Joining host Dave Schrader (email) in the first half of our 13th annual JFK Assassination Special, veteran investigative reporter, Philip Shenon, spoke to the questions that have haunted our nation for half a century: Was the President killed by a single gunman? Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission discover the whole truth of what happened on November 22, 1963? When Shenon began his extensive study of the crime, he was open to the notion that a conspiracy was behind the assassination. However, he ended up concluding that while the Warren Commission did a poor job in its investigation, Oswald was indeed the single shooter.
The CIA recently acknowledged that it engaged in a cover-up to hide information from the Warren Commission. Both the CIA and FBI wanted to hide their own incompetence and bungling, as these agencies had information about Oswald before the assassination, and knew he was a serious threat to Kennedy, Shenon asserted. Further, "the assassination could easily have been prevented if the government simply acted on the information that was in its own files in November 1963," he continued. The Jim Garrison investigation, he added, was flawed, and built upon a large amount of false evidence.
In the latter half, fresh from the JFK Assassination Conference, author and publisher Kris Millegan, and Jim Botelho, the former Marine roommate of Lee Harvey Oswald also explored who was behind the assassination, and reached much different conclusions than Shenon. One of the revelations at the conference was testimony that the so-called official autopsy photographs and X-rays of JFK were not the real ones, Millegan reported. The assassination was a coup d'état, a kind of "psychological warfare" enacted upon the American people, Millegan suggested, adding that "Hoover, Johnson, Dulles, George H.W. Bush, and Nelson Rockefeller" were behind the plan with Ed Landsdale of the CIA "writing the script for it."
Botelho characterized Oswald as a dedicated Marine who strongly believed in America, and noted that he wore a ring with a Marine Corps emblem on his hand until the day he died. "He wouldn't compromise his principles to commit such a high crime against the country," Botelho maintained. The assassination was a very sophisticated operation, employing a "wilderness of mirrors," and the guided use of misdirection to allay suspicions against the perpetrators, Millegan commented.