JFK Assassination 60th Anniversary Prompts Conferences, Books, Films, Probes

The Nov. 22 60th anniversary of the history-changing assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has prompted many new books, films and other commentary, including stellar new programs at three annual research conferences.

The Justice Integrity Project typically supports all three of the conferences but this year is primarily focused on one attracting major speakers to one organized by The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh beginning Wednesday, Nov. 15 and continuing through Friday, Nov. 17.

The speaker program is here. It showcases top experts drawn from as far as Europe, including former Secret Service special agent Paul Landis and film and TV star, Alex Baldwin, a respected author and researcher into the assassination shown at left in a photo via Getty Images.

The Wecht Institute, which will be dedicated with new research materials during the conference, is named for the eminent forensic pathologist, author, medical school professor and coroner Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., who has disputed since the 1960s many official findings regarding the causes of Kennedy's death. Wecht also co-founded and chairs the group Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), which is co-sponsoring the Pittsburgh conference. He is shown in a file photo at right,

Justice Integrity Project Editor Andrew Kreig, a founding member of CAPA's board, will moderate a CAPA segment of the conference on the evening of Nov. 16 that will include a lifetime achievement awards presentation to Wecht. It includes a video replay of his blunt denunciation three decades ago at a 1993 JFK Assassination research conference in Chicago, whereby Wecht, a longtime medical school professor and author of sixty books, including textbooks used in medical schools, challenged in blunt terms the scientific acumen of those other members of the American Medical Association who had claimed that one bullet could have caused so many wounds for Kennedy, popularly known as JFK, and Texas Gov. John Connally, who was riding in the same limo and survived multiple wounds.

Connally, a World War II combat veteran and former U.S. Treasury Secretary shown at left on a Time Magazine cover, always insisted that gunshots came from multiple directions and that bullet fragments remained lodged in his body throughout his life. Both of those Connally arguments undercut the "single bullet theory" proposed by the Warren Commission and its Assistant Counsel Arlen Specter, the future U.S. senator from Pennsylvania,. The Warren Commission issued a still-controversial report in 1964 that blamed the entire killing and planning solely on former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald, who insisted he was innocent, at a Dallas police station on Nov. 24, 1963, two days after JFK's murder, thus preventing a trial of Oswald's defense. Many researchers have argued along with Wecht that Oswald could not have killed JFK acting alone, with many also arguing that Oswald likely did not fire a shot and was instead a patsy, as Oswald himself claimed.

Two other annual JFK research conferences will be in Dallas, usually the site of CAPA's annual conference. Those conferences are organized by JFK Lancer Productions (named for JFK's Secret Service code name "Lancer"), led by Debra Conway, Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock from Nov. 17 to 20, and the JFK Historical Group, led by David Denton from Nov. 16 to 19. Details on their programs are here and here, respectively.

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Conference Schedule In Pittsburgh

From the programing announcement of the Wecht Institute regarding its conference: The JFK Assassination at 60: New Frontiers in Scientific, Medical, Legal and Historical Research.

Three score since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, what could possibly remain to be learned about his death? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Even as the U.S. government continues to withhold files scheduled for release in 2017 and the mainstream media persists in disparaging those pursuing an answer to this mystery as “conspiracy theorists,” independent investigators around the world – including scientists, physicians, attorneys, educators and journalists – are advancing lines of research ranging from criminalistic analysis of events in Dealey Plaza to Oswald’s and Ruby’s connections to shortcomings of prior official investigations, and beyond.

In partnership with Citizens Against Political Assassinations, the symposium will convene experts from a variety of fields, along with lay researchers, to help us advance and clarify our collective understanding not only of how JFK died, but why, as well as why it still matters today. Revisit our previous JFK conferences.

Whether you’re a professional interested in earning 12 continuing education credits, an educator or student of any number of associated disciplines, or simply an armchair sleuth with a fascination in the subject matter, we hope you’ll consider joining us.

This year's annual symposium is a hybrid event, and the entire event will be recorded. Virtual registrants will have the opportunity to access these recordings until the end of the year (December 31, 2023) using the same links they used for the live event. Onsite registrants who are interested in accessing the recordings can make inquiries regarding their access.

Citizens Against Political Assassinations will host a reception on Duquesne’s campus to honor Dr. Cyril Wecht with a Profile in Courage award and to hear film director and producer, Irving Nestor, present findings of his Dealey Plaza 3D scan. Registration was due Friday, Oct. 27 for the 40/plate dinner fee, separate from the cost of the Symposium.

Prepare to immerse yourself in captivating presentations, thought-provoking discussions, and the opportunity to connect with experts and fellow enthusiasts alike. The Annual Symposium promises a dynamic and comprehensive experience that paves the way for new perspectives, lasting connections, and the exchange of knowledge that will shape the future. All presentations are scheduled to take place in the Duquesne University's Union Ballroom, unless otherwise noted.

Wednesday, November 15
5:30 p.m. Reception
7:00 p.m. Welcome and Introductions: Benjamin E. Wecht, M.A.
7:10 p.m. Opening Remarks: Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.
7:20 p.m. Keynote Introduction: Ken Gormley, J.D.
7:30 p.m. Keynote Address: 'Why JFK's Camelot Endures – and Why It Still Matters', Barbara Perry, Ph.D.
8:30 p.m. 'Why JFK's Assassination Will Not Go Away, Alec Baldwin, TV and film star
9:00 p.m. Adjournment

Thursday, November 16: Criminalistics, Forensic Science and Medicine

8:30 a.m. Welcome and Introductions: Benjamin E. Wecht, M.A., Pamela Marshall, Ph.D.

8:45 a.m. 'Converging Lines of Evidence in the Case for Two Headshots', Gary Aguilar, M.D., Josiah Thompson, Ph.D., Doug DeSalles, M.D., Bill Simpich, Esq.

10:00 a.m. 'The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Breaks His Silence After Sixty Years,' Paul Landis (USSS Ret.); James Robenalt, Esq.

10:45 a.m. Break

11:00 a.m. 'Forensic Reactions to an Historical Revelation', P. Landis, C. Wecht, Ken Gormley, J.D.

11:30 a.m. 'Two Brain Exams Following JFK’s Autopsy,' Douglas Horne (USN Ret.)

Concurrent Session (613) 'Forensic Modeling of Human Reactions and a JFK Assassination Timeline', Brian Roselle, M.S.

12:30 p.m. Lunch ($12.50 box lunch available for purchase. Please order by Nov. 1.)

12:45 p.m. Special Brownbag Session 1: 'Documenting the Authenticity of the Zapruder Film', Robert Groden (by Zoom)

1:15 p.m. Special Brownbag Session 2: 'Who Killed JFK?', Rob Reiner (by Zoom)

1:45 p.m. 'Gauging the Authenticity of the General Walker Bullet', Lawrence Schnapf, Esq.

Concurrent Session (613) 'An Audio Forensic Analysis of the JFK Assassination', Donald Maue
2:45 p.m. 'As Easy as 1-2-3-4-5: Understanding the JFK Assassination', David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D.

Concurrent Session (613) 'The Oswald Letter: An Analysis of Dyslexia and How It Changes our Understanding of the Assassination', Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. (by Zoom)

3:45 p.m. Break

4:00 p.m. 'Unmasking the Rockefeller Committee Medical Panel', Russell Kent

5:00 p.m. Adjournment

6:00 p.m. CAPA Dinner Reception (Additional $40/plate fee to attend. Registration now closed.)

Friday, November 17: History, Politics and the Future

8 a.m. Invitation-only session for speakers, featuring longtime trial attorney, peace activist and author Morris Wolff, describing his work with President John F. Kennedy, U.S. Attorney Gen. Robert K. Kennedy, Warren Commission Member John Sherman Cooper, Warren Commission Assistant Counsel Arlen Specter and others, with introduction by Andrew Kreig, J.D., M.S.L.

8:45 a.m. Welcome and Introductions: Benjamin E. Wecht, M.A., Pamela Marshall, Ph.D.

9:00 a.m. The Assassination of President Kennedy: Understanding the Cold War Context, John Newman, Ph.D.

10:00 a.m. The CIA and JFK: What 30 Years of Reporting Tell Me, Jefferson Morley

Concurrent Session (AR) Carousel Contortionista: Jack Ruby, His Strippers, and their Moving Horses, Mark de Valk, Ph.D., M.A.

11:00 a.m. Break

11:15 a.m. 'New Findings About TSBD Building Owner David Harold Byrd', Daniel Alcorn, Esq.

Concurrent Session (AR) J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson and how they Obstructed Justice, R. Andrew Kiel

12:15 p.m. Lunch ($12.50 box lunch available for purchase. Please order by Nov. 1.)

12:30 p.m. Special Brownbad Session: 'Four Died Trying,' Libby Handros and John Kirby

1:30 p.m. 'The Death of JFK and the Rise of the Neocons in U.S. Foreign Policy,' James DiEugenio, M.A.

Concurrent Session 1 (AR) An Inside Perspective on the Relationship between Lee Oswald and the Paines, Robert Manz, M.A.

2:30 p.m. 'Lessons from the Assassination Records Review Board: The Value of Investigative Research with Respect to National Security', David Montague, Ph.D.
Concurrent Session 1 (AR) 'Our Method of Teaching the Assassination: Inspiring the Next Generation of Researchers', Ronald Burda, J.D. and Michael Vollbach, MA, MS

Concurrent Session 2 (613) Lee Oswald: The Patchwork Kid, Greg R. Parker (Pre-recorded by Zoom)

3:30 p.m. Break

3:45 p.m. 'Why Our Side is Winning/Losing the Media War', David Talbot (by Zoom)

4:45 p.m. 'Closing Remarks', Ellen Gawalt, Ph.D.

5:00 p.m. Adjournment

Related News Coverage

Nov. 22

Lee and Marina Oswald (far right) and their child with Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Romanovich Zieger and Eleanor Zieger. Warren Commission Exhibit No. 2628. Photo credit: National Archives

WhoWhatWhy Podcast, Conflicting Memories of Two ‘Friends’ of Lee Oswald, Jeff Schechtman, Nov. 22, 2023. Exclusive interviews with two who knew Lee Oswald, offering unique insights into the enigmatic figure linked to JFK’s assassination.

As part of the WhoWhatWhy special series commemorating the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, we bring you exclusive interviews with two individuals closely connected to Lee Oswald. Offering contrasting perspectives, these interviews shed light on Oswald’s complex character and his place in the tragedy of Kennedy’s death.

First, we hear from professor Paul Gregory, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and an expert in Soviet and Russian economics. Gregory’s unique connection to Oswald began in Texas in 1962, following Oswald’s return from the Soviet Union with his Russian wife, Marina. Gregory’s insights are further detailed in his book The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee.

We also speak with Ernst Titovets, a Minsk-based medical doctor and neurosurgery professor, who said he befriended Oswald during his Soviet sojourn. Titovets’s memoir, Oswald: Russian Episode, opens a rare window into Oswald’s life in the USSR and provides a critical analysis of the Kennedy assassination investigations, weighing official narratives against his personal experiences.

These are intimate accounts, providing sharply contrary insights into the enigma of Lee Oswald through the eyes of some of those who interacted with him in a critical period — the several years before he allegedly shot Kennedy.

• Interview with Paul Gregory:
• Interview with Ernst Titovets:

About the JFK Assassination Series

This series was inspired by an ongoing project of WhoWhatWhy Founder and Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker to produce a definitive, meticulous, book-length investigation of Kennedy’s death. Click here for the introduction to the series. To read the other articles in this series, go here.

If you have information to bring to our attention about any aspect of the JFK assassination — or are with the media and interested in covering or reproducing our work or inviting Mr. Baker to appear on a program — please click here. If you would like to be on a mailing list to receive news of the book, click here. To sign up for WhoWhatWhy newsletters, click here.

WhoWhatWhy, Evidence Oswald Was Not a Real Defector to USSR, Jane Rusconi, Nov. 22, 2023. He was used, then discarded. And for what? Four years before Lee Harvey Oswald became infamous as President John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin, he played an equally unlikely role as a teenage defector to the Soviet Union.

The official story will have you believe the defection was evidence of his communist leanings and his growing disillusionment with the US which would eventually — on November 22, 1963 — turn violent. The facts of his defection tell a very different story, that of a high-value and unusually experienced young American intelligence operative on a very sensitive mission.

It’s September, 1959. You’re 19 years old, fresh out of the Marines on an emergency discharge to care for your ailing mother, but then for some very compelling reasons (whatever they are), you decide you must defect to the Soviet Union ASAP.

In 1959, it’s not difficult to migrate to the socialist side of the Iron Curtain. Berlin is still an open city. You can stroll over to the east and present yourself as a defector to the DDR Volkspolizei or even directly to the Russian soldiers stationed there. The only problem is that doing so is not going to get you to the USSR if that is your goal.

And that is your goal: USSR or bust.

The defector pathway eastward was established in the early 1950s while Austria and Germany were still under occupation. Defectors were a mixed bag of opportunists, miscreants, and malcontents: GIs fleeing prosecution for criminal activity or past leftist political affiliations, couples in interracial or otherwise forbidden relationships, economic migrants, and the occasional Marxist ideologue.

This is how it went: A defector fled to the Eastern Bloc and requested asylum from officials. After the police or army interrogated them for a couple of days, they’d be sent to a village in East Germany to live among their fellow defectors, taught a useful trade, and then resettled somewhere in the DDR or maybe Bratislava or Brno or some other satellite city a safe distance from the Russian border.

Although the defectors themselves didn’t know what was going to happen, the US intelligence agencies were aware of the typical route for these legitimate defectors. Aware, because they were grappling with the difficulty of building a human intelligence infrastructure inside the USSR.

The CIA, established in 1947, is a Cold War kid. Unlike Great Britain’s MI6 (founded in 1909), the US didn’t have a preexisting intel presence in czarist or Bolshevik Russia. That meant that US intelligence usually had to rely on their British counterparts for on-the-ground operations. The formula was simple: The US paid the bills and MI6 provided human resources. But by the mid-1950s, after high-ranking British diplomats and officials were outed as KGB moles in the Cambridge Five spy scandal, the CIA knew it had to move to a more independent model.

The CIA also knew this: To place an intelligence asset in the USSR, you had to start from inside the USSR. To this end, as a longtime military intelligence officer put it, it was “not an unusual operation” to set up a “fake defection.”

However, that presented some bureaucratic considerations. To get into Russia, one needed a visa, either for business or tourism. Business visas required a valid business purpose, an impossibility for an unemployed teenage ex-Marine. Tourist visas were available from several Soviet consulates in Europe but required a processing time of seven to 14 days or more.

The only exception to this was the less-frequented consulate in Helsinki; an official there could fulfill a tourist visa request in 24 hours or less.

You disembark your freighter in Le Havre and make a beeline for London. A teenager on his first trip to Europe. A man in a hurry. Your next move somehow avoids generating any official travel records or witnesses but sure enough, you resurface within 24 hours. In Helsinki.

In 1959, it’s deep insider knowledge that the Soviet consulate in Helsinki is the place for a quickie USSR visa. A series of CIA and State Department memos in September and October of 1959 confirms this very detail — that a US citizen who purchases a tourist package to the USSR can get a visa in as little as 24 hours from the Soviet consulate in Helsinki. But this isn’t public knowledge at the time or for the next 15 years, because those documents won’t begin to be declassified until 1978.

So how is it that in 1959 an unemployed American teenager on his first trip to Europe knows to make his way to Helsinki for a quick Soviet visa?

October 31, 1959. Halloween. The US Embassy, Moscow. Shortly before closing time, you make your way to the lobby, asking to speak to a consular official. It’s Saturday hours, the offices are quiet. You want to announce your intention to defect, a most unusual step for a defector, but yours is a life full of unusual steps.

The setting at the embassy is unfamiliar but the people around you are from the same subset of Americans that you’ve been associating with since the age of 15 and perhaps even earlier: specifically, intelligence assets. Your personal Venn diagram overlaps with these types wherever you go in the world: New Orleans, Texas, Japan, California, and now the USSR. Always within an arm’s reach of US intelligence, just as you are as you sit in the waiting room next to Ned Keenan, a graduate student and future Harvard dean who is currently studying in Leningrad.

Your name is called. The man across the desk was officially CIA a few years back, might be CIA under State Department cover now. Who knows? Whatever the truth is, his career is murky enough for him to prevaricate about it to a congressional committee 15 years later, a situation that the committee deems “extremely troubling.”

But today, you trust him with what you have to say about your intended defection. He reports later that it sounded like a “preplanned speech.” Maybe so. But still, he listens and tries to reason with you. He’s unmoved by your stated intention to offer military secrets to the Russians, even though this should result in your being detained and charged with crimes. Maybe you remind him of the university students he recruited for a CIA informant program a few years ago. Students like Ned Keenan, who you saw in the lobby. Young Mr. Keenan will go on to meet with sources in Russia, be expelled from the country, and later be reported in Russian media as having worked for the CIA.

The consular official takes your passport from you for safekeeping or something. Apparently, you can’t renounce your citizenship on Saturdays; you’ll have to return another day to fill out the proper forms. Which you don’t do but at least you know where your passport is and exactly who is holding on to it should you ever decide to return to the US. Which you will do in two years’ time.

The consular official’s assistant listens in on the whole exchange and then appoints himself unofficial press agent, tipping off favored reporters that this young Marxist defector might make a good story for the folks back home. One of those reporters took up journalism only after her job application had been rejected by the CIA. Now she’s in Moscow, taking story tips from US consular officials with intelligence ties.

You tell your plaintive but not-very-accurate life story to the US media. It’s the compelling tale of a poor boy from Fort Worth who’s seen the ravages of capitalism firsthand in his single mother’s quest to support her sons with minimum wage jobs. Never mind that you’re not really from Fort Worth or that your extended family in your actual hometown of New Orleans has longstanding ties to intelligence agencies, organized crime, and influential citizens. Or that somehow, by age 19, you’re conversant in German, Spanish, and Russian.

While other defectors are publicly denounced as “mentally ill” or “homosexuals” or even “bestialists” by the US government, Lee Harvey Oswald is just a Marxist misfit kid. It makes a fleetingly sensational local story in 1959 but it makes a globally sensational story in November 1963 when he’s arrested in Dallas for killing the president of the United States.

You say “They’ve taken me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union.” You say “I’m just a patsy.” Not one of your well-connected friends steps forward to defend you even though they know you didn’t do this.

You deny all charges but you don’t get to clear your name before you’re murdered three days later. You die as you lived, within arm’s reach of US intelligence.

Jane Rusconi was the research coordinator for the 1991 film 'JFK,' which led to the JFK Records Act of 1992.

Nov. 19

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Former Secret Service agent who witnessed the JFK assassination speaks at Duquesne University, Jacob Geanous, Nov. 19, 2023. Paul Landis, who was in the car behind President Kennedy when he was shot, has released a memoir.

To this day, former U.S. Secret Service agent Paul Landis says he has no reservations about removing the “magic bullet” that was lodged in the back of John F. Kennedy’s limousine on the day he was assassinated — but the sight of the former president as he was gunned down has played on a loop in his head ever since.

Mr. Landis, who released his memoir detailing his stint with the Secret Service titled, The Final Witness last month, was featured as one of the keynote speakers at the 22nd Annual Wecht Symposium at Duquesne University commemorating the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.

In the memoir, Mr. Landis, who had been in the car behind the vehicle Kennedy was shot in during a parade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, recounted how he took the bullet from Kennedy’s limousine and later put it on then-Texas Governor John Connally’s stretcher out of fear that it would get picked up by a bystander or lost.

The bullet, which appears completely undamaged, went on to spawn the “magic-bullet theory” conspiracy which claimed that the bullet struck Kennedy in the back, exited through his throat, and struck Connally, who was seated in front of Kennedy and was also injured in the assassination.

“I did not feel guilty at all anytime after the assassination,” Mr. Landis said during the symposium on Thursday. “I felt I did the right thing.”

Mr. Landis was joined on stage by lawyer and author James Robenalt, president of Duquesne and former law professor Ken Gormley, and Dr. Cyril Wecht — a nationally recognized medical-legal consultant, author, and expert on many of the past half-century’s highest profile deaths — who said the revelations from Mr. Landis disproved the theory that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally.

“It just pours more concrete over the gravesite over the single-bullet [theory],” Dr. Wecht said, adding that the bullet’s final resting place in the backseat has continued to stump him.

“I can’t tell you how many hours I consume as I go through the day and think through the night, trying to go to sleep, trying to reconstruct it,” Dr. Wecht said. “Nobody has accurately done that and this is a criticism of me as well as everyone else.”

And while the mechanics of the shooting itself have remained a mystery, Dr. Wecht discussed his long-held theory regarding who was behind the assassination, which he said he believes was a small group that included rogue elements of the CIA and the Italian mob.

“The motive would have been to stop Kennedy’s socio-political agenda, nationally and internationally” Dr Wecht said.

This year’s Wecht Symposium attracted a crowd of over 100 lawyers, doctors, researchers, scholars, and history buffs.

Other featured discussions included the legitimacy of a pair of brain exams following Kennedy’s autopsy, an acoustic analysis of the assassination and a review of a mysterious letter JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald wrote days before he himself was killed.

Also in attendance were a pair of attorneys, Lawrence Schnapf and William Simpich, who are suing the federal government in an attempt to obtain more records regarding the assassination.

The event also attracted the former chief financial officer of the Allegheny Health Network, Jeff Crudele, who traveled from South Florida to attend the symposium and now hosts the podcast “JFK - The Enduring Secret.”

“I think a lot of people from the outside who look at people who are still intensely interested in this may think its an obsession of some sort, but it's really a lot more than that,” Mr. Crudele said. “This country is only a small number of years away from its 250th anniversary and there’s only been one time, in all the history of this country, there’s been a transference of power that wasn’t through the prescribed democratic process.”

The symposium also came one week after Dr. Wecht donated a voluminous collection of his work to Duquesne University.

The collection includes Dr. Wecht’s case files into high-profile killings that include David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, JonBenet Ramsey, the Menendez brothers, Casey Anthony, Scott Peterson, and Chandra Levy.

“Anyone who follows famous criminal investigations or the debate on the JFK assassination will know the name Cyril Wecht,” University Archivist Tom White said in a statement. “We are excited to have the collection of such a prominent and experienced figure in the world of forensic pathology. This collection will be valuable to students, researchers, criminologists, historians and anyone trying to understand the assassinations in the 1960s.”

White House Secret Service agent Paul Landis lifts John F. Kennedy Jr. into the air on the South Lawn of the White House on May 17, 1962 (Photo by Cecil Stoughton via the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum).

Washington Post, Commentary: 60 years later, a Secret Service agent grapples with JFK assassination, James D. Robenalt, Nov. 21, 2023. James D. Robenalt is the author of “The Harding Affair, Love and Espionage During the Great War” and “January 1973, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever.” He practices law in Cleveland at Thompson Hine LLP.

Paul Landis stood guard outside Parkland Memorial Hospital’s Trauma Room No. 1 as Father Oscar Huber rushed past, dressed in his Roman collar. It was just before 1 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. Less than half an hour earlier, Landis had been riding on the running board of a Secret Service car when he witnessed President John F. Kennedy’s murder up close as the motorcade drove through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza.

Now, as the 28-year-old agent kept an eye on his official protectee, the stunned first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, he watched Huber enter the trauma room to deliver Kennedy’s last rites.

“Si capax,” Huber whispered into the president’s ear. Translated from Latin, his prayer went: “If it is possible, I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

For Landis, who was raised Presbyterian in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, Catholic rituals were a mystery, but he knew this final blessing was of critical importance to the first lady. He waited outside the room for Jackie and Huber to emerge.

Landis, 88, is one of the few survivors who had a firsthand view of the tragedy. He is only now telling his whole story, in a book published last month, titled The Final Witness.

Sixty years after the assassination, the events of Nov. 22, 1963, have come to seem like a chapter firmly rooted in history, the subject of debate — and conspiracy theories — among many people born multiple generations later. But to Landis, his memories from Dealey Plaza and Parkland remain immediate, and the revelations those memories bring are helping reshape our understanding of that fateful day.

I have worked with Landis over the past six months, helping him prepare for the media attention that we knew would follow his book’s publication. Much of that attention focused on his assertion that he found an intact bullet on top of the rear car seat behind where Kennedy was shot — a claim that has cast fresh doubt on official narratives of the assassination. But we’ve also had many conversations about his experience on Nov. 22 and the complicated nature of memory in the aftermath of a trauma.

Landis was only there in Dallas because Jackie Kennedy — in whose security detail he served — had decided to accompany her husband on this campaign trip. It was his first time in a motorcade. In the moments before the president was shot, Landis was scanning the relatively thin crowd as the presidential limousine and his follow-on car, code-named Halfback, drove along Elm Street, below the Texas School Book Depository.

The crowds were enthusiastic and non-threatening. “I just remember as we moved closer to the business district, there was a lady among a group of children holding up a sign that read, ‘Please Stop, Mr. President,’” he recalled. “We started to pass by, but the president stopped the limo and started to shake hands with the children and adults, who immediately converged on the car. All the agents jumped off the follow-on car and took up protective positions around the limo until we started moving again. I heard the lady with the sign yell in excitement, ‘It worked, our sign worked!’”

Paul Landis, right, with the author in June. (Courtesy of James Robenalt)

As the cavalcade reached Dealey Plaza and the cars drove toward the Stemmons Freeway, a shot rang out. “When we reached Dealey Plaza and the cars straightened, first thing I heard was a sharp report that I immediately recognized as the sound of a high-powered rifle,” he said. “I had been around guns all my life, as a sportsman and Secret Service agent, so I knew the sound of rifles. It wasn’t a firecracker.”

He looked around and saw the president leaning toward the first lady but didn’t know whether he had been hit.

Then two more shots followed. “I saw a flash of white as the right side of the President Kennedy’s head exploded in a pink spray of blood, flesh and brain matter,” he wrote in his book. “I automatically ducked, not wanting to be splattered as we drove through it.”

Once at Parkland, Landis witnessed a scene of pure horror. The inside of the limo looked as if a bomb had gone off — blood, human tissue and bullet fragments were scattered everywhere. Jackie Kennedy was bent over her husband’s head, which she cradled in her lap. She wanted no one to see his condition. She wouldn’t let go.

Landis and Agent Clint Hill, also on the first lady’s detail, climbed into the back seat. “I said, ‘Let me help you, Mrs. Kennedy,’ and she kept repeating, ‘No, no, no, I want to stay with him,’” he remembered. “And she would not release the president.” Finally, he said, Hill “figured out that he needed to remove his coat and cover the president’s head so no one would see the devastating head wound.” With this, Jackie finally surrendered her husband’s body.

Landis noticed two bullet fragments in a pool of blood next to where Jackie sat. Then he saw a fully intact bullet on top of the rear seat, he said, behind where the president had been sitting when the final shot or shots knocked him violently back and to the left. “I scanned the area,” he said, “noticing that all the agents were rushing into the emergency room, and there was no one left to secure the limo.” Worried that the intact bullet might be lost or stolen by a souvenir seeker, Landis picked up the bullet and took it into the hospital. He would leave it on the president’s stretcher in Trauma Room No. 1, expecting it to be found by the doctors during an autopsy.

Landis knew the president was dead the moment he saw the final hit to his head. The clock on top of the Texas School Book Depository read 12:30 p.m. It quickly became clear that there was no chance of saving Kennedy, yet doctors still made an effort to resuscitate him. “After all, this was the president of the United States,” Landis says.

Landis was in complete shock. “My greatest fear was that I was going to pass out,” he said. The image in his mind of the president’s exploding head would not stop playing on loop.

As he stood outside the trauma room, he focused on the first lady, who entered the trauma room several times. “I was only a few feet away from her when she stood up and walked into an area of the emergency room with curtained booths,” he said. “She stood for some time just staring at the wall. I walked over and asked if there was anything I could do. She just shook her head no.”

From the muddle of that day, one memory stands out: when a committee had to decide the time of death. White House assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff huddled with Landis and others present. “He said: We need to have everything in proper sequence — what we will say to the public and the press, when the last rites were given — everything in proper sequence,” Landis said.

Landis would have placed the time of death at 12:30 p.m. Central time, when the sniper’s bullet (or bullets) hit the president’s head. But because Father Huber hadn’t arrived at Parkland until nearly 1 p.m., the group agreed to set the time of death as 1 p.m. — to comfort the family and the nation with the fiction that the president had survived long enough to receive the last rites of his Church.

And so it would be. Kilduff famously made the death announcement to the press in a room at Parkland normally used as a nurses’ classroom. With high emotions and a breaking voice, Kilduff said: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 o’clock, Central standard time, today, here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the president.”

That time was picked up by Walter Cronkite of CBS News, who interrupted the soap opera “As the World Turns” to tell the nation of the president’s death. “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central standard time, 2 o’clock Eastern standard time, some 38 minutes ago.” He took off his glasses and choked up.

Meanwhile, Landis was on his way to Love Field with the president’s casket. He would fly back to D.C. on Air Force One. “I broke down on the plane,” he said. “I probably cried the entire way to Washington.” His thoughts were with the Kennedy children he knew so well and the first lady in the back of the plane sitting next to casket containing the remains of her husband.

History changed that day, and so did Landis’s life. He toughed it out for another six months on protective duty for Jackie Kennedy and her children, but when his nightmares didn’t dissipate, he knew it was time to leave. Sixty years later, he finally has unburdened himself of his memories.

Nov. 9

The seven-member Warren Commission, led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (shown at center left) and including its chief counsel, presents its report in 1964 on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy to President Lyndon B. Johnson (shown at center right).

New York Magazine, Secrets of the JFK Assassination Archive:  How a dogged journalist proved that the CIA lied about Oswald and Cuba — and spent decades covering it up, Scott Sayare, Nov. 9, 2023. In 1988, in an elevator at a film festival in Havana, the director Oliver Stone was handed a copy of On the Trail of the Assassins, a newly published account of the murder of President John F. Kennedy.

Stone, right, admired Kennedy with an almost spiritual intensity and viewed his death on November 22, 1963 — 60 years ago this month — as a hard line in American history: the “before” hopeful and good; the “after” catastrophic. Yet he had never given much thought to the particulars of the assassination. “I believed that Lee Oswald shot the president,” he said. “I had no problem with that.” On the Trail of the Assassins, written by the Louisiana appellate judge Jim Garrison, proposed something darker. In 1963, Garrison, below, had been district attorney of New Orleans, Oswald’s home in the months before the killing. He began an investigation and had soon traced the contours of a vast government conspiracy orchestrated by the CIA; Oswald was the “patsy” he famously claimed to be. Stone read Garrison’s book three times, bought the film rights, and took them to Warner Bros. “I was hot at the time,” Stone told me. “I could write my own ticket, within reason.” The studio gave him $40 million to make a movie.

The resulting film, JFK, was a scandal well before it came anywhere near a theater. “Some insults to intelligence and decency rise (sink?) far enough to warrant objection,” the Chicago Tribune columnist Jon Margolis wrote just as shooting began. “Such an insult now looms. It is JFK.” Newsweek called the film “a work of propaganda,” as did Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who specifically likened Stone to the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. “It could spoil a generation of American politics,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in the Washington Post.

Critics objected in particular to Stone’s ennoblement of Garrison, whose investigation was widely viewed, including by many conspiracy theorists, as a farce. And yet some of the response to the film looked an awful lot like a form of repression, a slightly desperate refusal to acknowledge that the official version of the Kennedy assassination had never been especially convincing. One week after the assassination and five days after Oswald himself was killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, President Lyndon Johnson convened a panel of seven “very distinguished citizens,” led by Chief Justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court, to investigate. Ten months later, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, firing three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, had killed Kennedy entirely on his own for reasons impossible to state. Notwithstanding JFK’s distortions — “It’s a Hollywood movie,” Stone pointed out — the film noted quite accurately that the Warren Commission seemed to be contradicted by its own evidence.

In a famous courtroom scene, Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, showed the Zapruder film, the long-suppressed footage of the shooting, rewinding it for the jury as he narrated the movement of Kennedy’s exploding cranium — “Back, and to the left; back, and to the left” — which suggested a shot not from behind, where Oswald was, but from the front right, in the direction of the so-called Grassy Knoll, where numerous witnesses testified to having seen, heard, and even smelled gunshots. (Stone had offered the role of Garrison to Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson, who both passed, but Costner, the very symbol of wholesome Americana, was actually the more subversive choice.) In another courtroom scene, Garrison appeared to dismantle the “single-bullet theory,” according to which the same round had been responsible for seven entry and exit wounds in Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally — an improbable scenario made all the more so by the alleged bullet itself, which was recovered in near-pristine condition. The simplest explanation would have been that all those wounds were caused by more than one bullet, but this would have meant either that Oswald had fired, reloaded, and again fired his bolt-action rifle in less than the 2.3 seconds required to do so or, more realistically, that there was a second shooter.
President Kennedy’s limousine shortly after he was shot. The Grassy Knoll is visible in the background. Photo: APTN/AP Photo

Three of the seven members of the Warren Commission eventually disavowed its findings, as did President Johnson. In 1979, after a thoroughgoing reinvestigation, the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially concluded that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” But such findings seemed not to penetrate. “In view of the overwhelming evidence that Oswald could not have acted alone (if he acted at all), the most remarkable feature of the assassination is not the abundance of conspiracy theories,” Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, remarked in Harper’s, “but the rejection of a conspiracy theory by the ‘best and brightest.’” For complex reasons of history, psychology, and politics, within the American Establishment it remained inadvisable to speak of conspiracy unless you did not mind being labeled a kook.

Stone ended his film in the style of a documentary, with a written text scrolling beneath John Williams’s high-patriotic arrangement for string and horns, that deplored the official secrecy that still surrounded the assassination. Large portions of the Warren Report, Kennedy’s full autopsy records, and much of the evidence collected by the HSCA had never been cleared for public release. When JFK came out in December 1991, this ongoing secrecy quickly supplanted the movie itself as a subject of public scandal. Within a month, the New York Times was editorializing, if begrudgingly, in Stone’s defense. (“The public’s right to information does not depend on the integrity or good faith of those who seek it.”) By May 1992, congressional hearings about a declassification bill were underway. Stone, invited to testify before the House, declared, “The stone wall must come down.” CIA director Robert Gates pledged to disclose, or at least submit for review, “every relevant scrap of paper in CIA’s possession.” “The only thing more horrifying to me than the assassination itself,” Gates said, “is the insidious, perverse notion that elements of the American government, that my own agency had some part in it.”

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 mandated that “all Government records related to the assassination” be provided to the National Archives and made available to the public. The historian Steven M. Gillon has called it the “most ambitious declassification effort in American history.” It has done little to refute Gates’s “insidious, perverse notion.” On the contrary, for those with the inclination to look and the expertise to interpret what they find, the records now in the public realm are terrifically damning to the Warren Commission and to the CIA.

Among the first visitors to the JFK Assassination Records Collection was Jefferson Morley, then a 34-year-old editor from the Washington Post. Morley had made a name for himself in magazines in the 1980s. He helped break the Iran-Contra scandal for The New Republic and wrote a much-discussed gonzo essay about the War on Drugs for which he’d spent an evening smoking crack cocaine. By that time, he’d become Washington editor of The Nation. He drank with Christopher Hitchens, with whom he was once deported, after a gathering with some Czech dissidents, by that country’s secret police. “He was a little out there,” a colleague at the Post recalled. “But you want some people like that in the newsroom.” Morley had read about the Kennedy assassination for years as a hobby, but it never occurred to him that he might report on it himself. “I never thought I had anything to add,” he told me. “Until 1992.”

Jefferson Morley, right, has become known as one of the most sober-minded assassination researchers. He spent so much time looking at CIA documents that he adopted the same filing system.

I visited Morley in Washington in September. He is now 65 and somewhat more demure than his younger self, if still combative, with a sweep of gray hair, a high brow, and a sharp nose that together lend him a vaguely avian aspect, an impression heightened by his tendency to cock his head quizzically, like an owl, and speak into the middle distance. We met at the brick rowhouse that he still shares with his second wife, with whom he is in the midst of a divorce. She will keep the house, and Morley was not yet certain where he would go, but they agreed that he could stay through “the coming JFK season,” as he put it. His small office is there, as is his personal file collection, three decades of once-classified records culled from the National Archives and stored in worn banker’s boxes, tens of thousands of photocopy sheets arranged chronologically and, in duplicate form, by subject matter. “If you use what we’ve learned since the ’90s to evaluate the government’s case,” he told me, “the government’s case disintegrates.”

Morley, the author of three books on the CIA and the editor of a Substack blog of modest but impassioned following called JFK Facts, has made a name for himself among assassination researchers by attempting to approach Kennedy’s murder as if it were any other subject. “Journalists never report the JFK story journalistically,” he said. Early on, when Morley was still at the Post, editors would frequently ask, “What does this tell us about who shot JFK?” “I have no idea!” he responded. “I have to have a fucking conspiracy theory?”

He did not set out to make a career of the JFK Act, but the declassification process has taken longer than expected. At the urging of the CIA and other agencies, President Donald Trump twice extended the original 2017 deadline. In 2021, President Joe Biden pushed it to 2022 before extending it once again. At least 320,000 “assassination-related” documents have been released; by one estimate, some 4,000 remain withheld or redacted, the majority belonging to the CIA.

Morley’s serious interest in the assassination had begun in the early 1980s, prompted by Christopher Lasch’s attack on the conspiracy taboo in Harper’s. (He’d helped edit the essay.) He began to read the available literature. Some of the “conspiracy” books were highly suppositious, in his view, but some he found to be impressively thoughtful, documented, even restrained. Sylvia Meagher’s 1967 critique of the Warren Commission, Accessories After the Fact, based on a close reading of the commission’s report and its appendices, was particularly influential. She is shown at left. The report “didn’t hang together,” Morley said, “didn’t make sense on its own terms.”

In 1992, during passage of the JFK Act, he was hired by the Washington Post to work for “Outlook,” the paper’s Sunday opinion section, an outpost of impertinence and boundary-testing in an otherwise buttoned-down newsroom. By Morley’s recollection, he pitched a piece about the JFK archive during his job interview. “They didn’t realize all these records were coming out, they weren’t really paying attention, and I was on the ball,” Morley said.

Morley visited the new archive after work, prospecting for stories, and began contacting researchers of the assassination to ask for guidance. Among them was John Newman, a U.S. Army major who had spent 20 years in Army intelligence and written a widely praised history of Kennedy and Vietnam. Newman, who also served as a consultant on JFK, was then at work on a book about Oswald and his connections to the CIA.

The possibility of such a tie had been floated since almost the moment Kennedy was shot. The mutual detestation between Kennedy and the Agency, especially after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, was widely known in Washington. It is a measure of the paranoia of the era, and also of the Agency’s reputation for lawlessness, that on the afternoon of his brother’s murder, Robert Kennedy summoned the director of the CIA to his home to ask “if they” — the CIA — “had killed my brother,” Kennedy later recalled. (The director, John McCone, said they had not.) The Agency assured the Warren Commission that, prior to the assassination, it had had no particular interest in Oswald and almost no information on him whatsoever. This had always seemed implausible. Oswald was only 24 when he died, but his life had been eventful. He had served as a radar operator in the Marine Corps, stationed at an air base in Japan from which the CIA flew U-2 spy missions over Russia; had then defected to Moscow, where he told American diplomats that he planned to tell the Soviets everything he knew; had been closely watched, if not recruited, by Soviet intelligence services; and had then, in 1962, after more than two and a half years in the USSR, returned, Russian wife in tow, to the United States. One would think the CIA might have taken somewhat more than a passing interest.

Early on, Newman had photocopied the entirety of Oswald’s pre-assassination CIA file at the archive and brought it home. Morley came often to study it. “I had read something that said, you know, they only had five documents on him,” Morley said. “And it was like, ‘No, there were 42.’”

Whatever mystique may attach to it, the CIA is also a highly articulated bureaucracy. Newman encouraged Morley to focus less on the documents themselves than on the attached routing slips. “When you start getting into spy services, everybody lies,” Newman told me. “And so how do you know anything?” The answer was “traffic analysis.” Even if the information contained in an intelligence file was false, Newman believed an account of how that information flowed — who received it, in what form, from whom, when — could be a reliable source of insight.

CIA officer George Joannides, right, a key figure in the CIA's anti-Cuban activity and efforts to thwart investigations into the JFK Assassination. cover-up of its actions, according to extensive FOIA litigation and cutting-edge reporting by Jefferson Morley.

Via cryptic acronyms, the Agency’s routing slips recorded precisely who had been receiving information on Oswald in the period leading up to the assassination. “It was, when you saw it, a lot of people,” Morley recalled. “I just remember being in John’s basement and thinking, Oh my God.” A large number of senior CIA officers at the Agency’s headquarters had evidently been tracking Oswald, and tracking him closely, since well before November 22, 1963. “The idea that this guy came out of nowhere was self-evidently not true,” Morley said. “That was a door swinging open for me.”

 

Justice Integrity Project Readers Guide To JFK Assassination

By Andrew Kreig, JIP Editor and CAPA Board member

What follows are excerpts from our Project's previous segments of a "Readers Guide" to the assassination begun in 2013 to underscore both the 50th anniversary of the death and its continuing relevance, particularly slanted media, government, and academic treatment of the death that serves as a Rosetta Stone to similar slanted coverage sensitive matters extending through the decades to today's news.

The Justice Integrity Project cooperates with Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) and The Indicter, each of which investigates suspected political assassinations around the world.

In the Readers Guide below, a red asterisk (*) denotes major articles in the series. Other articles may be regarded as more routine or duplicative treatments sometimes covering specific events.

At right is a photo by this editor in Dallas showing Dealey Plaza. The Texas Book Depository Building where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald worked is behind the row of trees. The car in the center lane is near the location of President Kennedy's limo at the time of his fatal shooting. The "X" mark is repeatedly painted on the street by author and photographic expert Robert Groden as reminder of the horrific crime that Dallas authorities seek to expunge by removing the X.

1. Project Launches JFK Assassination Readers' Guide, Oct. 16, 2013.
2. Project Provides JFK Readers Guide To New Books, Videos, Oct. 26, 2013. This is a list of new books and films in 2013.
3. Disputes Erupt Over NY Times, New Yorker, Washington Post Reviews of JFK Murder, Nov. 7, 2013. *
4. Self-Censorship In JFK TV Treatments Duplicates Corporate Print Media's Apathy, Cowardice, Nov. 7, 2013.
5. 'Puppetry' Hardback Launched Nov. 19 at DC Author Forum on ‘White House Mysteries & Media,'  Nov. 19, 2013.
6. Major Media Stick With Oswald 'Lone Gunman' JFK Theory, Nov. 27, 2013.
7. JFK Murder Scene Trapped Its Victim In Kill Zone, Nov. 30, 2013.
8. Project Lists JFK Assassination Reports, Archives, Videos, Events, Nov. 2, 2013. *
9. JFK Murder, The CIA, and 8 Things Every American Should Know, Dec. 9, 2013. *
10. JFK Murder Prompts Expert Reader Reactions, Dec. 19, 2013. Reactions to our Dec. 9 column. 
11. Have Spy Agencies Co-Opted Presidents and the Press? Dec. 23, 2013. *
12. Don't Be Fooled By 'Conspiracy Theory' Smears, May 26, 2014. *
13. Experts To Reveal Secrets of JFK Murder, Cover-up at Sept. 26-28 DC Forum , Sept. 5, 2014. 
14. Washington Post Still Selling Warren Report 50 Years Later, Sept. 22, 2014. *
15. JFK Experts To Explode Myths, Sign Books In DC Sept. 26-28, Sept. 24, 2014.
16. Former Cuban Militant Leader Claims CIA Meeting With Oswald Before JFK Killing, Sept. 27, 2014. *
17. JFK Readers Guide: Assassination Books, Reports, Oct. 15, 2014. *
18. Former House JFK Murder Prober Alleges CIA ‘Lied,’ Seeks Hidden Records, Oct. 18, 2014. *
19. The JFK Murder 'Cover-up' Still Matters -- As Does C-SPAN's Coverage, Nov. 11, 2014. *
20. JFK, Nov. 22 and the Continuing Cover-Up, Nov. 24, 2014. *
21. JFK Assassination Readers Guide To 2013-14 Events, Nov. 28, 2014. *
22. CIA, Empowered by JFK Murder Cover-up, Blocks Senate Torture Report, Dec. 1, 2014. *
23. Nearly Too Late, Public Learns of Bill Moyers’ Conflicts Over PBS, LBJ, Jan. 2, 2014.
24. Why Bill O'Reilly's Lie About JFK's Murder Might Matter To You, March 17, 2015.
25. Free Videos Show Shocking Claims About CIA, JFK Murder Probes, June 29, 2015.
26. Pioneering Black Secret Service JFK Guard Abraham Bolden Warns Of Current Lessons, July 22, 2015.
27. Understanding Hollywood-Style Presidential Propaganda From JFK To Trump, Aug. 18, 2015.
28. Beware Of Wrong Conclusions From New CIA Disclosure On Oswald, Sept. 28, 2015.
29. The JFK Murder Cover-Up: Your Rosetta Stone To Today’s News, Nov. 29, 2015.
30. Austin Kiplinger, David Skorton: Two Civic Giants Going And Coming, Dec. 15, 2015.
31. Trump Alleges Rafael Cruz Tie To JFK Murder Suspect Oswald, May 3, 2016.
32. Revelations Confirm Proof Of JFK, RFK Murder Cover-ups, Nov. 25, 2016.
33. Top Experts To Assess JFK Murder Records, Revelations March 16, March 8, 2017.
34. Speaker Program For March 16 Forum On Secret JFK Records, March 8, 2017.
35. JFK Experts Advocate Compliance With Records Deadline, March 8, 2017.
36. At CAPA Forum, JFK Experts See Need, Momentum For Assassination Records Release, March 23, 2017.
37. Time Magazine, History Channel Ramp Up Oswald-JFK Fake News, April 26, 2017.
38. JFK Birthday Prompts Inspiration, Art, Advocacy, Snark, June 2, 2017.
39. Deep State Killed JFK For His Cuba Policy, Peace Advocacy, Experts Say, June 13, 2017.
40. Newly Released JFK Murder Files Prompt Disputes, 'Jigsaw' Solutions, Aug. 4, 2017.
41. CAPA Challenges Warren Report Defenders Sabato, Shenon, Sept. 22, 2017.
42. Trump Plans Release Of Suppressed JFK Records, Oct. 21, 2017.
43. Trump Backs Off Promise To Release All Suppressed JFK Documents Today; Permits Partial Release, Oct. 26, 2017.
44. More JFK Murder Records Released On Nov. 9, Nov. 10, 2017. 
45. TV Star John Barbour Premieres New JFK Documentary In DC With Free Screenings, Lectures, Nov. 13, 2017.
46. Two Major Annual JFK Research Conferences Launch Friday In Dallas, Nov. 15, 2017.
47. DC, Dallas Nov. 22 Events Mark JFK Murder, Official Cover-up, Nov. 22, 2017
48. Assessing Newly Released JFK Records, Alec Baldwin's Slam of NBC Cover-up, Dec. 19, 2017.
49. DC 'Big Event' Boosts Pressure To Disclose Suppressed JFK Records, March 16, 2018.
50. Trump Postpones Some JFK Documents At Deadline For Three Years, Releases Others, April 26, 2018.
51. Trump Suppresses JFK Murder Records, Violates Pledge, Bows To CIA, Deep State, May 1, 2018.
52. Rights Pioneer's Obit Prompts Disputes Over JFK Murder Half-Truths, May 29, 2018.
53. Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half-Truths History (four-part series on life, legacy of George H. W. Bush), published from Dec. 9 through Dec. 14, 2018, with link to first installment).
54. Kennedy and King Family Members and Advisors Call for Congress to Reopen Assassination Probes, Jan. 20, 2019.
55. 3 JFK Research Conferences In Dallas From Nov. 21-24, Andrew Kreig, Nov. 17, 2019. 

Andrew Kreig, the author of the series excerpted above, is a non-profit executive, investigative reporter, author and attorney based in Washington, DC.