‘It was a conspiracy’: Rob Reiner says he solved JFK assassination

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As America marked the 60th anniversary of President John F Kennedy’s murder this week, actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner has made new bombshell claims about who might have been involved in his assassination Nov. 22, 1963.

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As Reiner and journalist Soledad O’Brien dive into the tragic event in their new iHeart podcast Who Killed JFK? — a 10-part series featuring interviews with authors, witnesses, CIA officials, former Secret Service agents and forensic experts that investigates JFK’s murder — the director has said they have uncovered the identity of Kennedy’s true killers.

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According to the official record, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and fired the bullet that ended Kennedy’s life outside Dealey Plaza in Dallas 60 years ago. But Reiner, 76, says “there were four” shooters.

“It was definitely a conspiracy — there’s no question about that,” Reiner said in an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber this week.

“Those of us who were alive during that time will never, ever forget where we were when we heard that news. I was in high school, physics class, and a kid came in, whispered it to the teacher and he said, ‘I have some very bad news.’ The country was in shock. [Then] we saw on live television the man who was accused of killing Kennedy himself get murdered. I saw that happen,” he said. “It was a trauma for the whole nation. [But] it was the first time in our nation’s history we started questioning whether or not the government was telling us the truth. Up until then, we were the heroes. We won the Second World War, we were the good guys, we believed everything the government told us. Then the Warren Commission Report came out, and there were some people who were saying, ‘This doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.’ When we started to question it, things fell apart.”

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Over the past 60 years, “drips and drabs of things have poked through,” he continued. Now the podcast puts 60 years’ worth of investigation all in one place and by the time the finale airs, Reiner, who has been “studying this forever,” says they will have conclusive proof as to who killed Kennedy.

“By the 10th episode, you will have a complete picture of what happened on that day.”

Reiner, who is best-known for directing Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men, says he studied the footage shot by Abraham Zapruder, which captured the moment Kennedy was shot on 8mm film, he concluded that there had to have been more than one shooter.

“You watch the Zapruder film over and over again,” Reiner told the Orlando Sun Sentinel. “And then when you watch that, it really becomes clear. No way that a bullet comes through Kennedy and then stops for a little while and it waits to hit [Texas Governor John] Connelly. None of it makes sense. And Connelly himself said too until the day he died, ‘The bullet that hit Kennedy didn’t hit me.’”

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With O’Brien and author Dick Russell, Reiner says he’s “very confident on the conspiracy part of it.”

“That, I’m 100% confident on. Exactly who did what, we make our best guess based on all the information we have,” he told the Sun Sentinel. “We name the shooters. We name the positions the shooters were in. Some people say there were four, others say five, and I’m still wrestling with that. But based on the forensics, we know there were four.”

But the names of the killers won’t be unveiled until closer to the end of the podcast’s run in the new year.

“We say in the podcast for sure there was somebody up on the sixth floor,” the All in the Family actor added. “And there were people, there was somebody, firing from the sixth floor.”

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In yet another interview with Town & Country, Reiner said that while “most of the people who planned the assassination are long gone” the podcast’s revelations “will be making news.”

He added that the fact that Kennedy’s murder has been fodder for conspiracy theorists for so long is proof that powerful arms of the government haven’t always acted in the best interest of America.

“The fact is these things do happen. Look at the Kennedy assassination from all angles and from all that has come out, and there is no question that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone gunman,” he told the magazine. “There were others involved. All you have to do is look at what the CIA has done. Look at their playbook. There is a thing called Operation Northwoods [a proposed 1962 false flag operation meant to justify a war against Cuba]. From hardliners in the CIA and the military and the mafia to Cuban exiles who felt abandoned at the Bay of Pigs fiasco, there was plenty of anger and hatred toward Kennedy.”

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In announcing the series earlier this month, Reiner called the assassination “the greatest murder mystery in U.S. history.”

“Sixty years ago President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of Dallas,” Reiner said in a statement. “The American people deserve to know the truth of what happened on that fateful day. Who Killed JFK? will take the listener on an evidenced-based journey to reveal that truth.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com

X: @markhdaniell

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