Who Killed JFK? That question has haunted America for 60 years and we still ask that question.
Now, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, filmmaker Rob Reiner has joined award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien to tell the history of "America’s greatest murder mystery".
O'Brien, who many remember from her time at CNN, joined WCCO's Adam and Jordana on Thursday to talk about the importance of the project that looks back on six decades worth of information and evidence.
"The thing I think that was so interesting for me when I first started talking to Rob Reiner about this project, was that I think a lot of people of my generation, who were born after the assassination, kind of just know it from the history books," O'Brien explains. "This happened, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and then the single bullet theory. We move on, but I didn't realize the degree to which for a generation before me, kind of Rob Reiner's generation, it was so transformative about how they thought about the government and the government lying to them."
It's a story trying to find meaning around what really happened says O'Brien who is now 57. She says it's a story with so many contradictions and so many absurdities it boggles the mind.
"Anybody of that generation kind of ahead of me was sort of like, maybe there's more, right? And then you begin to realize when you dig deeper into it that actually the government contradicting itself in various investigations," O'Brien says. "And there have been so many. Just the other day, we had a former Secret Service Agent come out 60 years later to talk about where the bullet was found. I mean, it's so crazy. I think there are 5,000 pieces of evidence that still have not been released. And of course, there are lots of sort of shady, shifty things that the CIA certainly has denied that perpetrated over many years around this case that just make it so suspicious."
O'Brien explains that one of the people doing the first autopsy actually burned the paperwork in a fireplace.
"And you're like, what? Who does that? I was talking to a physician last night and he's like, yeah, that makes no sense," she says. "His answer was that it had gotten a little bit of blood on it and he thought that would be distressing for people. So he burned it. But he was assuring everybody that it was exactly the same as this new copy that he had written. The list kind of goes on and on and on of just things that were bizarre."
Does the podcast answer the question, "Who Killed JFK?"
"I'm not going to tell you, you're going to have to at least get to part nine before we start revealing," jokes O'Brien. "I will say this. Because we do sort of point out things, we do name names, we do walk through Cuban exiles. Certainly we're in the category of people who hated Kennedy. The CIA clearly after the Bay of Pigs and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a real rift between Kennedy and some of his military advisers. And of course you no longer had that in Cuba because Castro came into power. So they lost all of their businesses there. So you had these three very powerful groups who all really had a very good and clear motive for wanting the President of the United States dead. We examine all of those threads over our 10 part series, but I'm absolutely positively not going to tell you what our theory is."
One thing O'Brien does appear to rule out? The Government acting alone.
"I always think that conspiracy theories are too high level for government officials," she tells WCCO. "I honestly don't feel that enough government officials are smart enough to pull this stuff off. And coordinate it enough to pull this off. I still think about that today. People are talking about the Deep State. I'm like, how smart do you think these elected officials are? I don't think that they're that organized."
During the series, they 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.
To learn more and listen to the podcast, click here.