Episodes

Twitter Facebook World War II was a change agent in history like no other. It can best be understood in pieces, barely grasped as a whole. In this audio narration of Chapter 24 of The American Yawp, a U.S. History Textbook available as a free, modifiable educational resource, I narrate the American history piece. The chapter sets it within the context of all other pieces. I am that rare narrator who is also an historian. I have taken the opportunity to make a few important corrections to the tex...

Twitter Facebook History Speaks again! My audio narration of “The Great Depression,” chapter twenty-three from the blockbuster Open Resource textbook, The American Yawp, is now out. As an historian myself, I have enhanced this recording and narrative by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright with a few additions of my own, in keeping with the democratic principles of Open Educational Resources (OER), which this document is. My contributions to this document, freely distributed as all OER are, are dedicated...

Twitter Facebook 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 t...

Twitter Facebook This chapter may be seen as the Big Enchilada of the Report. Did the Warren Commission provide a credible investigation of the possibility of conspiracy in the crime? The staff wracked its collective brains to see where any possible conspiracy might have emerged given the facts in the case. It also tracked down leads offered by private citizens that seemed the least bit credible. This chapter of more than 130 pages, the longest in the Report, is the fruit of their work. One thin...

Twitter Facebook 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 e...

Twitter Facebook In Chapter Four we have an overview of the evidence against Oswald. Here I summarize the chapter. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook 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 i...

Twitter Facebook 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. ...

Twitter Facebook 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 chapt...

Twitter Facebook 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 en...

Twitter Facebook 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. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook 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. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook 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 Commission and its Warren Report far out weigh the particular weaknesses examined in a previous episode on Audibly Speaking. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook 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....

Twitter Facebook 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...

Twitter Facebook 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 six...

Twitter Facebook 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 November 1963, when the president of the United States unexpectedly came into his sights. Listen to this podcast episode for some insights into these questions. Twitter Faceboo...

Twitter Facebook 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. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In this three-part series, we go into the mind of the assassin and try to understand Oswald’s motives. This helps us understand why conspiracy thinking about the assassination makes no sense. If you believe that Oswald lacked motive, ability or opportunity to shoot JFK, a conspiracy seems to be a necessary alternative. In fact none of these three things were lacking in 1963. There was no need for conspiracy. Oswald, however unbalanced, was actually quite smart. His plans for gre...

Twitter Facebook 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 th...

Twitter Facebook 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 mysel...

Twitter Facebook 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.” Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Most of the thousands of books on the JFK assassination are re-cyclings and re-spinnings of the foundational myths of the first generation of conspiracy fabulation tales. To hear Rob Reiner’s repetition of the tired magic bullet trope that we have heard before–you know the one that has long since been debunked–it seems that the half-story hoaxes that I discussed in my first Warren Commission episode two weeks ago are not just historical relics of the past. They continue to be re...

Twitter Facebook One of the chief reasons why people still believe the nonsense of a conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy is because of the fiendishness of those, out of malice or effort at pecuniary gain, deliberately lie to their readers and tell only half of a story they know too well to be false. We examine two of the many half-story hoaxes, as I call them, which try to spread the lie of conspiracy by covering up the proofs of no-conspiracy which have grown to mountainous propo...