‘There Was A Coup In This Country In 1963’

This Nov. 22 marks the exact 60^th anniversary of the 1963 shooting of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas — and it’s also  the date a new nonfiction streaming series, “Four Died Trying,” premieres on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Google Play. The documentary, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, investigates not only the JFK liquidation, but also the people and players allegedly behind the assassinations of Malcolm X on Feb. 21, 1965; Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 1968; and Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy on June 6, 1968. 

The ambitious series includes interviews with MLK’s daughter Bernice King; former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young; comedian Dick Gregory; Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz; nonviolence advocate Rev. James Lawson ; Rev. Jesse Jackson; RFK’s daughter Kathleen Kennedy-Townsend; and film director and JFK conspiracy buff Oliver Stone. New York University Professor Mark Crispin Miller, an expert on media propaganda, is the series’ consulting producer, as well as an interview subject.

Are these earnest investigative reporters unearthing new evidence and providing proof in their multi-part series, or spinning more conspiracy theories? To find out, Truthdig viewed an advance screening of the series’ hour-long prologue and interviewed the filmmakers via Zoom at their offices in Brooklyn. 

Truthdig: Do either of you remember exactly where you were at the time of any of the assassinations in your “Four Died Trying” series?

Libby Handros: I was in second grade living in Phoenix [in 1968] and my mother was head of [Sen. Eugene] McCarthy for president in Arizona… My mother, being very political, stayed up late to watch the returns from the California primary and I woke up very early in the morning and there she was devastated that she had seen the assassination of Bobby Kennedy live on TV. Then she had to explain to me because we had done all this McCarthy stuff that this was bad that RFK had been assassinated. 

I can remember Martin Luther King’s assassination as well, which was two months before. I was at school — my mother had seen him speak in 1957 at Riverside Church [in New York City]. So, I was clued into all these things.  

Truthdig: What is the premise of “Four Died Trying?”

John Kirby: To borrow the phrase of one of the godfathers of Kennedy assassination research [Vincent Salandria], each of these killings is a false mystery. We know what happened to these guys. Each of these leaders in the 1960s were killed by the powers-that-be because of what they were doing at the time. They were each of them, in their own ways, working for a better world.

President Kennedy in ways that even people who look at this don’t understand. He was a major anti-colonial advocate who was receiving the new leaders of newly formed, post-colonial African nations at the White House in numbers that no one else had done. He was, of course, refusing to invade Cuba on at least two occasions, attempting rapprochement with Khruschev and Castro. He was trying to end the Cold War. And he was investigating Lyndon Johnson.

All kinds of things were happening that did not endear him to the establishment, and he had to be killed quickly. On the very day of his assassination there was a hearing in the Senate about an arms kickback scandal Lyndon Johnson was involved in, about transferring the TFX fighter contract from Boeing to General Dynamics. Johnson was getting kickbacks for doing things like this. So, it’s not that Johnson killed him, or the mob killed him, or the CIA killed him, or the Pentagon or whoever — they all participated in this. And the evidence for that is abundant and obvious.

The point is, each of these people were doing things that were of profound embarrassment to the powers-that-be. Malcolm was going to bring charges against the U.S. in the U.N., in the World Court. Martin Luther King came out against the Vietnam War and was planning the occupation of Washington, D.C. [with the Poor People’s Campaign]. Bobby was becoming the candidate of the poor and disenfranchised and was talking about investigating his brother’s death and pulling out of Vietnam. The premise of our film is that these guys were killed — it’s not a mystery that they were killed by the state. What they were killed for is the important thing that needs to be understood. 

Truthdig: How many chapters will “Four Died Trying” be? How long will the series run?

JK: Over the course of seven years, we filmed 120 original, in-person interviews. Almost every single one of them could be their own episode or multi-episode that can stand alone.  Each episode will be as long as it needs to be, from 30 to 50 minutes. At a minimum, there’ll be 20 episodes. It’ll run for the next year or two.   

LH: The first season on each of the four men will take us to their assassinations. We’re going to take the JFK story up to the assassination. We’ll then come back and take the Malcolm story up to his assassination. Same thing for Martin Luther King and Bobby. Season two, we’ll pick up from the assassinations and through the investigations. 

JK: Through the citizen-led investigations. Of course, we’ll cover the scanty, obviously fraudulent official investigations. But we’ll be paying particular attention to the ordinary citizens who, starting with the Kennedy assassination, really took up the mantle of trying to tell the world what happened.

Truthdig: Your website says the series considers the “turning” each man was making in the last year of his life. What is the “turning” you’re referring to?

JK: As we’ve gone forward, we actually think it’s more of a “revealing,” rather than a “turning.” Each of these guys becomes more of who they were. As time goes on, they become more brave about who they were. For instance, John Kennedy, given his Irish background, which automatically puts him in an anti-colonial place, is already somebody who is against neo-colonial or neo-imperial adventures of the kind that happened in Laos, Cuba, Vietnam. While we were trying to support the anti-communist government in Vietnam, he recognized that it was a corrupt government and later came to regret his own suggestion that [Vietnam’s president Diem] be removed. Because he did not want to see Diem assassinated in Vietnam and we have tape of him talking about that.

Each of these people becomes who they are. Martin Luther King is always an antiwar person, he understands the giant triplets, as he calls them, of racism, militarism and extreme materialism are interlocked. It’s about him not necessarily really “turning” as [it is] coming into himself and finally being pushed to the edge where he has to speak about the war, although everybody around him is urging him not to. He’s being alienated from Lyndon Johnson — who never really was the civil rights advocate that people paint him to be, by the way.

He stood in the way of every civil rights bill that he could when he was in Congress. He was a racist monster, who’s been given a place in history that he does not deserve. He only helped along the ’57 and ’60 civil rights bills before he was vice president out of a need to get in the running for the presidency. He was helping the Southern wing of the Democratic Party suppress civil rights the whole way through, including the NAACP’s anti-lynching legislation he sat on for years. Johnson did not give a damn about these things.

Each of these men got more and more the courage of their convictions and made public statements about what they were going to do and were doing things that deeply frightened the powers-that-be.

Truthdig: I’m particularly interested in whatever new evidence you have unearthed. We can have grand theories about the ruling class and their interests, I want to stress proof. Who shot Kennedy?

JK: Who did it is a broad group at the top of American society. Broadly speaking, it’s the national security state. The establishment at the top level had to be okay with it. Who planned it? It’s a combination of people within the Pentagon, the CIA, Johnson, elements of the mob. There’s continually more evidence to show that all of these groups were involved.

The most fascinating evidence we’ve found is actually the evidence that has been there forever. Vince Salandria, who was really the godfather of Kennedy assassination researchers, the one who first challenged Arlen Specter [inventor of the “magic bullet” theory] publicly. All the evidence you need is in the Warren Commission Report. They say there were 50 witnesses that heard shots coming from this direction. Were they interviewed? They were not brought forward, they weren’t given any weight.

All you need to understand about the Kennedy assassination is in how they handled the investigation. Did they dry-clean Gov. [John] Connally’s clothes immediately after the shooting, erasing evidence? Yes, they did. Did they send the presidential limousine back to Ford to be rehabbed before marking where the dents, broken glass and all the evidence of multiple shots, coming from multiple directions were? Yes, they did! Did they allow the alleged prime suspect to be killed while in police custody, live on television? Yes, they did.

Would an honest government not secure the crime scene? Destroy evidence? Not interview witnesses? Allow the prime suspect to be killed while in its custody? Would an honest government have sent a message to the cabinet plane returning from Hawaii and to Air Force One after the arrest of [Lee Harvey] Oswald saying, “We got the guy. There is no conspiracy. Case closed.” Literally an hour after arresting Oswald. How could they have known there was no conspiracy? What they were doing is saying: “Don’t look into this.” 

One big scoop is when the Warren Report came out, in October 1964 Life magazine did an issue that explained the Warren Report and how great it was, with an article by Gerald Ford. It included full color stills of the Zapruder film. When this issue came out, Salandria and many other people saw it, looked at the captions, which described one thing, and then looked at the pictures from the Zapruder film, which showed another. They said, “Oh my god, they’re going to have to change this right away, because this does not describe what that is.” 

So, they went and bought new issues and low and behold, the magazine changed. The same issue, subsequent issues at the newsstand were altered. They had another picture or another caption. All told, Salandria found three separate editions at the time. Someone, somewhere, in the government most likely, was able to call up Life magazine and say: “Stop the presses! Break the plates!” We’re not talking about something online, we’re talking about the kind of machinery, the high-speed presses Life magazine used and the kind of glass plates that needed to be fabricated for every photo, and they would be shattered and broken. This was hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1960s dollars. 

We can show the sequence of how this happened and we found a fourth copy of Life magazine that nobody’s ever found. So, there’s four separate editions of the same issue of Life as the government, working with their friends at Life, all part of Operation Mockingbird, CIA control of the press, were able to stop the presses and alter the magazine. This is direct hard evidence of government control of the news media.     

Truthdig: And did Life suppress a pending story about LBJ’s illegal activities after he was sworn in as president?

LH: Yes. The magazine sent 12 reporters to Texas and they were combing over the Johnson story. In fact, that was going to be the cover of that week’s issue and that plate got broken to do the JFK assassination. That story disappeared.  It’s never been found.

JK: We have the last interview with James Wagenvoord, who was at Life, and who is an amazing fount of information.  He was in the offices of Life on the weekend of the assassination when a federal agent handed him an 8mm film of Oswald handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. This was ready-made material to implicate Oswald. He was also well aware that Life was preparing this massive story that would have sunk Johnson. He tells us that in our interview.

This is all part of what Bobby Kennedy, who was feeding this information, and others were doing to try and get rid of Johnson, who was on the wrong side of everything. He was not  progressive in any sense of the word. And all he does later is a show about that, as he prosecutes the Vietnam War, on behalf of his friends at Brown & Root and Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics. Johnson is the embodiment of the military-industrial-congressional-complex. He was about to sink. So, the time pressure is Johnson is either going to lose it all or gain it all. 

It couldn’t just be Johnson who decided to do this. The highest levels of the Secret Service, the CIA, FBI, Hoover — who was Johnson’s next-door neighbor for years and hated the Kennedys. These guys colluded to put Johnson into power so they can have their war in Vietnam. They could continue the Cold War. And the country was ruined and we haven’t had any president since then who hasn’t been a creature of this military-industrial-intelligence-complex.

Truthdig: Moving to Malcolm X: he went to Mecca and changed his tune about working with non-Black allies and was willing to work with progressive whites. Was that part of Malcolm’s “turning”? And would you say that what made him really dangerous was that instead of pursuing separatism, he was willing to work with allies?

LH: Any time any of these people expand the net, so it’s not just one little group, they become very threatening to the powers-that-be. So, if Malcolm X is going to work with white radicals, or with non-white [dominated] African nations to bring charges in the international court against the U.S. for human rights violations, that’s terribly threatening.

JK: They were fine with him being just part of this obscure separatist organization. Here’s another scoop: We have an incredible piece of audio from Malcolm’s second to last Organization of Afro-American Unity speech where he talks about the connection between the Nation of Islam, the Kennedy assassination and Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. It turns out, according to Malcolm, that Hunt was funding the Nation of Islam.  At one point, Hunt was the richest man in America, and profoundly reactionary. His funding may have been part of a number of these assassinations. He was also a profound racist. [George] Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, was at Nation of Islam meetings. Separatism is separatism — these were Black and white nationalist groups who found [common] ground. And H.L. Hunt was happy to fund both of them.

Truthdig: So, who shot Malcolm X?

LH: [Laughs.] That’s an interesting question. They just exonerated the people who were in jail for all these years. It looks like they were members of BOSSI [Bureau of Special Services and Investigations in the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division], the New York version of dirty tricks, the CIA, FBI. BOSSI was involved with COINTELPRO.

JK: We know the shotgun shooter, whose name was Bradley, was seen by a Marxist newspaper seller who we have interviewed, who was a friend of Malcolm’s, when he was in the police station.  [The shotgun shooter] wasn’t Nation of Islam at all, so NOI takes a bad rap for the killing of Malcolm X. In reality, there were massive intelligence forces operating through the NYPD intelligence arm, who were responsible for his death.  Federal agencies are integrated with local police forces.  With BOSSI, there is integration with the FBI.  BOSSI is helping the counterintelligence program Hoover set up to create infighting among civil rights and peace groups. The second in command at the Nation of Islam was apparently a paid asset of the FBI… 

Truthdig: James Earl Ray was convicted of shooting Dr. King. Who do you think really shot him?

LH: Who the actual shooters are in any of these assassinations is in a way not as important as who was behind the shooters. All four are state assassinations. So, therefore, we know that on site in Memphis there were military police sharpshooters that were on the roof of the fire station, right across the street, and they had the right angle for the Lorraine Motel. 

JK: They were Army officers who a city official let up onto the fire station. 

LH: We know probably there was a backup shooter or two. Think about it — James Earl Ray, some guy who broke out of jail for supposedly robbing a gas station or something, he ends up in London with passports that take him all over the world. I mean, this defies credulity that he could have been the one involved.

JK: The actual triggerman is not the most important thing though it may help reveal certain things. Certainly it’s not James Earl Ray. It’s unclear as to his level of understanding of what he was manipulated into being. But he was definitely set up to fall. We have an excellent interview with a former FBI agent who opened the door to the white Mustang that was Ray’s and out falls a packet of materials that are incredibly damning to the FBI and show their involvement in the killing of King.

We also have the final affidavit, a kind of legal interview, with the lawyer — a man named [Lewis] Garrison — for Loyd Jowers, who basically says Loyd Jowers was the actual shooter. Now, whether Loyd Jowers was or members of the Memphis Police Department were, we do know that Loyd Jowers probably took possession of the rifle. Loyd Jowers is the owner of the grill across from the Lorraine Motel and members of the Memphis Police and federal agents would meet there to help plan the assassination.

He’s the subject of a civil trial that no one knows about, in which Bill Pepper, in conjunction with the King family, sued Loyd Jowers in a civil suit, essentially to bring out the evidence. It’s criticized for not being adversarial, but many people did testify. We have now the testimony of people in Memphis who were witness to the crime scene being demolished, right after King was killed.  All of the brush that would have blocked the shot from the window was cut down.  

There’s only one witness that has James Earl Ray coming out of a bathroom and crossing a hallway, and it’s from a guy whose wife says was dead drunk at the time. They took that poor woman, Gracie Stevens, and they committed her, stuck her in a mental institution, something they did again and again [in these assassination cases], especially to women.

We have a New York Times reporter, Earl Caldwell, who was on the scene and had an interview, maybe the last interview, with King, he was in the floor below. He heard a boom and it was directly across, right out of the bushes. He thought he saw movement in the bushes. He wasn’t interviewed by a single police officer, they didn’t seal the crime scene, they didn’t ask for his testimony, even for the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations. 

The truth is right there. If the government was really like, “Oh Jesus Christ, who killed Kennedy and King? We’ve got to find out,” you would have seen a much different outcome from what we saw. What we saw was the worst policing. 

Truthdig: In the Bobby Kennedy case, Sirhan Sirhan is still sitting in jail. What’s the real story of the RFK liquidation?

LH: Somebody who was shot that night, Paul Schrade — who recently passed away and we probably have the last interview with him — dedicated the last years of his life to getting Sirhan Sirhan paroled. Because it was physically impossible for Paul Schrade and Bobby to have been shot by Sirhan because of where Schrade and Bobby were standing. Schrade says he was probably shot by Sirhan, but there’s no way Sirhan could have shot him and Bobby. Physically impossible.

JK: The coroner, Thomas Noguchi, found that Bobby Kennedy was in fact shot at point-blank range from behind. And every single witness there says Sirhan was never behind Kennedy and he never had his gun closer than around three feet. So, he could not give powder burns to Bobby Kennedy directly in the back of his right ear and right back. And his gun didn’t contain all of the bullets that were found. Thomas Noguchi wouldn’t change his story and he was fired by L.A. County and he had to sue to get his job back….

Sirhan Sirhan is so suggestible that his defense psychiatrist and the prosecution’s psychiatrist, they interview him — you can hear these tapes. They’ll hypnotize him and he’ll go under like that. They both said they’ve never seen anyone as suggestible as he was. Some people can be brought into a state of real control very easily. And Sirhan is one of those people. He has no memory of that night. 

A psychiatrist on Harvard’s staff interviewed Sirhan over 10 years and was able to very carefully work out what was happening to Sirhan, and he was clearly a project for some intelligence agency that basically put him on the scene to take the fall and stuffed news clippings about Bobby Kennedy supporting the sale of bombers to Israel to make it seem like, “Oh, this Palestinian guy just hated Bobby Kennedy for that reason. Here’s the motive. It’s right in his pocket. Case closed.”

Truthdig: Your series starts with President Eisenhower’s military-industrial-complex farewell speech. Your interview subject Robert Kennedy Jr. calls it “the most important speech in American history.” 

JK: It paints exactly where we are today. There’s the prologue, then chapter one begins with the military-industrial-complex speech. This is the profound warning Eisenhower gives us. He worries that a technocracy, a scientific elite, could control American democracy.  These things don’t bode well for democracy. It’s a profound warning from a general and a president to the American public that we unfortunately did not heed as we should have.

President Kennedy died trying to reverse the consequences, the reality of the new complex.  

Truthdig: What is the connection of the other three to the military-industrial-complex?  

LH: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both came out against the Vietnam War, very early. King is killed a year to the day that he spoke at Riverside Church and said we should not be in Vietnam. Bobby ran to pull out of Vietnam.  Anybody who wants peace has a very hard row to hoe.       

JK: In his June 10, 1963 American University commencement address, President Kennedy said the Russians are human too, they lost 20 million people fighting the Nazis. For that he’s a pinko, a traitor. Imagine saying that in Cold War America. You can’t humanize the Russians. They’re our enemy! That’s why it’s important in chapter one to remind people about McCarthyism and the Red Scare. It’s what President Kennedy and all of these guys had to deal with. 

Truthdig: Are these four assassinations coordinated, connected? Is there a “central casting” for assassins in the secret state?

LH: All four are state assassinations. So, the deep state becomes the connection. These four individuals are threats to the military-industrial-complex. 

JK: Johnson and Hoover and maybe people like Allen Dulles, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, if you’re asking about individuals, the nitty gritty details, yes, it’s the state that does it. But do each of these individuals show up in each case?

LH: Some of them go all the way back to the Bay of Pigs.

JK: They go all the way back to Guatemala [the CIA-backed 1954 coup that overthrew the left-leaning Arbenz government]. 

LH: Some of them go all the way forward to the Iranian hostage crisis [in 1979]. 

JK: E. Howard Hunt is deeply involved in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs. He’s devastated by Kennedy’s decision not to send in the troops, Air Force, to help the phony invasion team. He hates Kennedy for that reason, as his son tells us in our film. He’s deeply involved all over, according to Marita Lorenz and Mark Lane. The fact of Hunt’s involvement comes out in a deathbed confession. He admits to his son on tape: “I was a bench warmer.”

There was a coup in this country in 1963, and there hasn’t been a countercoup or a truth and reconciliation commission.  All of [the presidents since JFK] have been agents of the national security state. That’s our headline.  

For more information see: https://www.fourdiedtrying.com/. “Four Died Trying” premieres Nov. 22, 2023 on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Google Play and is on Apple TV for pre-order at: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/four-died-trying/umc.cmc.29e16njesfrh39dgigdig5svu.