Jefferson Morley
speaker
178 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jefferson Morley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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We want to live in peace, even with systems that are very different than ours, like the people who live under the Soviet system. And he said, you know, those people who live under the Soviet system, they are mortal just like us. And so Kennedy made this very eloquent appeal to wind down the Cold War by citing the common humanity of people. And this is why people still honor his name.
And this is why he is the most popular president when people go back and Ronald Reagan runs a distant second. It was because Kennedy had an articulated a strategy for peace. Now, you know, with his death, that strategy for peace was not pursued. Lyndon Johnson did what JFK didn't do. He escalated in Vietnam. He didn't pursue more negotiations with the Soviet Union.
And so Kennedy's dream was not realized, but he articulated it and people remembered it. And over the years, we have seen since the mid-1960s, you know, the United States has been at war pretty much constantly ever since then. 10 years in Vietnam, extensive engagement in Central America in the 80s, although not with US troops, but with US advisors.
And then after 9-11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, And now we have a war in Ukraine. So, you know, Kennedy was trying to demilitarize U.S. policy and he didn't succeed. But that dream of a strategy of peace, that's why Kennedy is still popular and that's why he's still relevant.
And people should Google JFK American University speech and listen to it and see. I think they will be struck by a tone that they haven't heard from any other U.S. president in terms of looking at the common good of humanity and how a president should pursue that. It's very important, and it's why Kennedy is still relevant.
Yeah. So in the past year, under President Biden's direction, executive branch agencies declassified some of the JFK documents that had redactions. And so for the first time, we saw some documents in their entirety. And one of the documents that was released in April of 2023, identified for the first time the name of the man who had read Lee Harvey Oswald's mail.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused assassin of President Kennedy. And it turned out that the CIA had been reading his mail from 1960 to 1962. And Ruben Efron was the man at the CIA who did that. Now, we had seen portions of Ruben Efron's memo before, but what Ruben Efron wrote a memo in 1962 to a colleague in the CIA, and he had recalled a letter that he had intercepted.
So this is male surveillance. So what the CIA was doing was they were intercepting the letters of people who had been targeted by the agency. They would get the letter, they would steam it open, they would copy it, they would read it, and they would file it, and then they would put the letter back in the envelope, reseal it, and send it on its way. So they're stealing the content of Oswald's mail.
Now, People may wonder, well, why were they reading the mail of the guy who supposedly shot the president? Well, Oswald was a Marine who had moved to the Soviet Union out of sympathy for communism. He lived there for a couple of years, married a Russian woman, and come home. And so the CIA was very interested in him, and they were reading his mail during this period.
But the important part about the story of Ruben Efron is not only did we not know that the CIA was reading his mail, not only did we not know that it was Ruben Efron in particular, a CIA operations officer who was doing it, but also... Ruben Efron wrote his memo to his colleague after Oswald had returned to the United States.
So the CIA was interested in Oswald even when he was back in the United States, which is a violation of the agency's charter, which says the agency, except in very limited circumstances, cannot target U.S. citizens or conduct operations on U.S. soil. So the CIA in the case of Oswald violated
that prohibition against that and they kept track of oswald while he was on u.s soil after 1962. so the importance of the reuben effron story which only came out when i published it in the new york times published it this past july was the cia had the accused assassin under surveillance and under surveillance in 1963, and indeed, right up until the week before Kennedy leaves for Dallas.
So we understand much better now how close the surveillance of Oswald was. You know, in this letter that Ruben Efron intercepted, it's not like... oh, look, he's betraying secrets or, oh, look, he could be a secret agent for us. It's nothing like that. They're interested in the details of his personal life. There was nothing exceptional in the letter.
There was no sensitive security content in that letter. They wanted to know about Oswald's state of mind. And so the story is important is, well, first of all, the CIA lied about that. They didn't disclose this to assassination investigators. But why were they interested in his state of mind? What was going on? Did they not realize he was a threat to the president?
And so we still don't have very good answers to those questions. But the Ruben Efron story shows us that he was watched very closely by people at the top of the CIA in 1963, in the weeks before Kennedy was killed.
Obviously, there's a breakdown of security in in Dealey Plaza. What's striking about the JFK story is no one was held accountable for that. OK, so Oswald was accused of the crime, but he has the presumption of innocence. He was never brought into court, so his guilt was never established by a court of law. It was established by a politically appointed commission, which specifically declined the
to appoint a counsel to defend Oswald's interests. Mark Lane was a New York lawyer. He came to the Warren Commission and said, look, Oswald's dead, but he deserves counsel to defend his interests in this. And the Warren Commission said no. And so the Warren Commission never gave Oswald the presumption of innocence. He was presumed guilty and they never really investigated any other alternative.
And so not only was no one ever brought to justice for the crime, but this, and I think this is equally significant, no one lost their job The head of the Secret Service was not fired after this atrocious failure in Dealey Plaza. The head of the FBI, which had been watching Oswald since his return, was not fired.
The head of the CIA and the people who had been maintaining the Oswald file at the CIA, none of them were held accountable. No one even knew who they were. Nobody in the Dallas Police Department lost their job. So in the eyes of the government, nobody did anything wrong that day, despite the fact that the president was killed in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people.
You know, that's very suspicious. Why would that be? How come nobody lost their job? Did everybody do their job? This was just, you know, a thing that happened? That's not plausible. And that's what sticks in people's minds is the whole story that they've been told, you know, it defies credulity on its face.
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