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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And then when you drill down on the facts, you see that the case is not very well supported. Some facts are not facts. Some facts are lies, you know, things that the CIA told the Warren Commission. Like, we didn't know anything about this guy. That's what CIA officials said under oath to the Warren Commission. It was, and I say it without fear of contradiction, a bald-faced lie.
They knew a lot about Oswald, and they knew it right before Kennedy went to Dallas. They knew his politics, his personal life, his foreign contacts. They were reading his mail. To say we only had minimal information about him, that was a cover story to cover the CIA's deep interest in the man who supposedly killed Kennedy.
The false statements given to the Warren Commission, to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to the press, you know, people have no confidence at all in the government and no confidence even that there's any process to regain that confidence. So, I mean, I've always looked at the JFK story as an opportunity to establish accountability and to get at a story that
is embarrassing to the government or, you know, whatever, but that the people would get the full story. Now, we still don't have the full story. And, you know, and when people say, oh yeah, we know one guy, a little man killed a big man, get over it. You know, I mean, most people don't believe that. They never have believed that. And it's not because of conspiracy theorists.
It's because of the circumstances of the crime. You know, right after the president was killed, within a week, pollsters went into the field, nationally reputable pollsters, and they asked people all sorts of questions. Where were you when this happened? What did you think? How did you feel? And then who do you think was responsible?
And one of the questions in the polls was, do you think more than one person was responsible? Okay. This is November, last week of November, 1963. At that point,
The White House, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Dallas Police, the New York Times, CBS News, the Washington Post, every national news organization and institution said, that dead guy, Lee Harvey Oswald, did it on his own and there's no politics involved here. That same week, when people were polled, 66% of people nationally said they believe more than one person was involved.
In Dallas, I think the figure was 62%. Anyway, a solid majority thought that more than one person was involved. At that point, there were no JFK conspiracy theorists. Oliver Stone was a senior in high school, okay? His movie was 30 Years in the Future. OK, there were no conspiracy theorists.
So it is not credible to say that conspiracy theorists created this belief that there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's death. It's simply factually false. We can see very clearly from the results of those polls done in November 1963 that it was the circumstances of decline. that convinced people that more than one person was involved. It was not conspiracy theorists.
And that figure has pretty much held ever since. 50 to 60% of people over the years fluctuates, but 50 to 60% of the people believe that the president was killed by his enemies. And about 35 to 40% believe the official story. So that disbelief is founded in fact, it was not created by conspiracy theorists.
Yeah, and you make a very important point there. You know, people ask me, why does the CIA care? You know, whoever was responsible, let's say people were responsible, they surely are not alive anymore. You know, why can't they just come clean? And the point is, is that, yes, it's a very important symbolic issue.
And people will say, well, you know, if your people were involved in this, in complicit or let it happen, you know, That's not a historical issue for the CIA today. That means a CIA official might get called up to Congress and say, explain this to us, Mr. Director. How did this happen?
And Congress might say, well, we're going to cut your budget because you've not been straight with us all these years. We're going to reorganize you. We're going to, you know, there are real world consequences for full JFK disclosure. which is why the CIA is fighting it so fiercely. And I mean, we are now six years past the deadline set by Congress and the CIA is still fighting.
We do not want to disclose. We do not want to disclose. And for good reasons, they have a lot to lose.
Well, I mean, we are skewed towards, you know, These military intelligence agencies, they get the budget they want, you know, and everybody else comes is in line after them, you know. And this is why the accountability around JFK is important as a symbolic issue and also as a real issue today is, you know, we've been at war. you know, pretty constantly since 1963. Kennedy offered an alternative.
We don't know exactly what he would have done. And he might have changed course. He might not have been a peacemaker. Of course, there's no way to tell. But he offered the possibility and he defined a choice, another path that was available. And, you know, that path is still available to us. But the entrenched power of these agencies is such that that option is not really on the table.
And look at it. I mean, look at what the CIA did. They rolled Trump and they rolled Biden, two very different presidents with very different attitudes towards the CIA. And the CIA got exactly what it wanted from them. That's how strong they are in the constellation of American power. They get what they want.
You know, I think that that broader cultural change, the counterculture, the emergence of a counterculture in the 1960s, that had many causes. The affluence after the postwar baby boom, the emergence of a civil rights movement where African-Americans are demanding full citizenship for the first time. Yeah.
you know, technological changes like the birth control pill, which changes the reality, social reality for women everywhere. You know, there were broad causes behind the cultural change that happened in the 1960s. But I think with Kennedy, what was lost was not so much that cultural change would have happened.
And in fact, we can see Kennedy as kind of a leading edge of that, that, that he's anticipating that there's going to be this movement against militarism in favor of civil rights. And as a politician, he's trying to get in front of that parade so that he can, you know, muster it towards his own ends. So I think that, you know, we would have had a counterculture and all that, but again,
Showing 61–80 of 178 · page 4 of 9
← Previous
Next →