Audibly Speaking: Listening to History

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 t...

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, noth...

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 assassinatio...

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.&nb...

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 e...

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...

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 m...

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, a...

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 cam...

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...

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 assassina...

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 pop...

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...

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...

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 spr...

Twitter Facebook Tom Buchanan moves his sad life from East Egg to New York City, and all those in his orbit pay the price in chapter two of this archetypal novel of the Jazz Age. The contrast between the glitter and the gutter, and the sadness of the last chance is seen in Myrtal, another person used and discarded by Tom. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby , was both a product of, and epitaph for, the Jazz Age of the Roaring ’20s.  Journey to West and East Egg again, as your host Rick Reiman narrates one of the great American novels of the twentieth (or any other) century. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Today is November 20, 2023, two days before the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  On the eve of this event, we look at the flagship government investigation of the crime, the Warren Commission and its work. Ironies abound in discussing the Commission. Its Report   has been savaged by many, most of whom have failed even to read it.  Critics, begin...

Twitter Facebook You may have seen and heard the classic story of “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” here on History Revisited and Audibly Speaking before, but this is a new version, now with annotations included from the observations in Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes , Volume II (New York: Norton’s, 2005).  Listen to the story and the annotat...

Twitter Facebook In the run up to Halloween, there no more terrifying, thrilling and horrifying story in the Sherlock Holmes canon than this, “The Cardboard Box.”  Publishers were frightened to publish it and its author, John Watson, was persuaded to do so only on his deathbed.  Listeners are strongly encouraged to listen only at noon, in the bright sunshine, when demons are...

Twitter Facebook In advance of the publication of Paul Landis’s new book on his memory as a Secret Service agent in the JFK detail on November 22, 1963, Landis has made a claim that has roiled the class of people interested in the controversies involving the JFK assassination.  In response to those parts of the claim that have been published (since the book itself will not come out unti...

Twitter Facebook This is Dr. Rick Reiman, professor of History at South Georgia State College.  Here I narrate sections from the National Archives’ public domain publication, “Putting the Bill of Rights to the Test.”  I read sections on the application of the First and Fifth Amendments. Listeners are encouraged to download the complete publication on the National Archives web sit...