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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Appearances
You know, if Kennedy had wound down in Vietnam and extracted the US from Vietnam in the way that Charles de Gaulle extracted France from Algeria, and that was a big, you know, geopolitical issue at the time. Algeria had been France's colony for, you know, decades, a century.
And it was very unpopular for De Gaulle to say, no, we're going to let Algeria go be an independent country and we're not going to mess with them. Kennedy was anti-colonial in his thinking. And this is something else that's underestimated about him, but very clear.
He really sympathized with these new countries that emerged after World War II in Africa and Asia that had been under colonial rule for centuries. and became independent after the war. And Kennedy said, yes, these countries have the right to self-determination. These colonial powers have no right to go in there and dominate these people. And so Kennedy was acting on that anti-colonial impulse.
And if Kennedy hadn't gone into Vietnam, we would have had the cultural change, I think, but you wouldn't have had that bitter division that the Vietnam War engendered. And, you know, we live in a polarized time today, but the late 1960s is the only time comparable to today where you had that kind of bitter polarization and a feeling all around, like, is the country going to survive?
Can we hang together, you know? And it turned out we did, you know, barely, but... if Kennedy hadn't been killed, or if Kennedy had pulled out of Vietnam, or even if there had been a real reckoning of who caused his death, that division around Vietnam wouldn't have happened. And so, yes, we would be, we would live in a very different country.
So to answer your question, we would have had a cultural change regardless. That was coming for many reasons, but we probably wouldn't have the loss of faith and the bitter divisions that we had in the 1960s and that are, you know, that we still live with today.
Where did the gunfire happen and why did Oswald do this and why did Ruby kill Oswald, that sort of thing?
Like, yeah, you know, we really focus on completing the record. You know, people are going to have strong feelings about this. And, you know, we're not out to convince anybody. Our position is let's get all the records out and then we can sort it out. We debate among ourselves, you know. Yeah. You know, was the CIA behind manipulating Oswald? Was it maybe a Pentagon operation?
Was it just some little faction within the government that nobody knew about? Did somebody at the top give the nod? You know, all of those types of questions. We talk about that among ourselves and, you know, and, and frankly, we disagree. It's like, nah, I don't think that's right. Yeah. I think, you know, to me though, that sort of conversation is,
You know, I'm a working journalist and an author. So I look at, you know, those are interesting conversations. Buy me another beer and I'll give you another theory. But in terms of what I'm going to write and say actually happened, you know, I don't spend a lot of time with that because I want to focus on what I can say absolutely for sure happened.
And in this very complicated story of like, what, why, why... You know, you're not going to be able to establish every fact. And, you know, people say, well, did Oswald kill Officer Tippett? And I'm like, you know, I think so. But, you know, I'm not I don't stake anything on that. You know, I'm not an expert in that. My beliefs in the JFK story don't hang on that factual question.
So I say, you know, I don't know. You know, and so people say, well, you know, Jeff, what's your theory? You know, I don't know who killed Kennedy. Some people do, but I don't.
Yeah. So who is this guy, really? So I'm a journalist. I've been in Washington working for national publications since 1983, so for 40 years, covering a wide variety of topics, CIA and national security issues. primarily, but many other issues, especially racial issues. And JFK Facts is the venue where I place my reporting on the JFK story today. What's new? That's what we're about, JFK facts.
What are the new facts? What are the old facts? What are the bad facts? So people want to know more about this approach. I think they should check out the JFK facts sub stack. We've got a team of writers. So Chad Nagel is a writer who I met recently through the American Conservative, actually. I'm not a conservative, but I like Chad's writing about the JFK story.
Very factual, very well informed historically. So he's a staff writer. And then we have another staff writer, Peter Voskamp, and he covers presidential politics. So he covers RFK Jr., He covers Trump. He covers Biden. Wherever the JFK story intrudes into our presidential politics, we have a writer who's there. He's not advocating for RFK, nor is he criticizing him.
He's trying to report who is this guy? What's he saying? What does that mean? Then we've got a managing editor, a guy named Steve Byrne, who's a veteran journalist of the Detroit Free Press. And he's kind of our hardcore newspaper guy, copy editor, fact checker. Kind of I let him he's kind of the traffic cop in terms of when do we publish. And so he's an essential part of the team. And then.
The head of our research is Margo Williams. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning researcher for the Washington Post and the New York Times, two Pulitzer Prizes. And so she's our research and fact checking person. So, you know, we're serious journalists. So that's kind of where we're coming from. In larger perspective, people want to know my work.
It's really important to know my books, which are not JFK assassination books. My three books about the CIA are biographies of men who were at the top of the CIA in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Three men.
My first book, Our Man in Mexico, is about Winston Scott, who was the chief of the CIA station in Mexico and who was in charge of the surveillance of Oswald when Oswald visits Mexico City shortly before the assassination. My second book, The Ghost, is about James Angleton, the chief of counterintelligence in the CIA from 1954 to 1974. And he was the man who controlled the Oswald file at the CIA.
And then my third CIA book is Scorpion's Dance about the relationship between Richard Nixon, the 35th president, and Richard Helms, the eighth director of the CIA. And that book tells the story of how the Kennedy assassination resonates after 1963, right up through Nixon's presidency and into the Watergate scandal. So
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