Who Killed JFK? Alec Baldwin and Rob Reiner Have Been Asking That Question for Decades

In the backyard of a modest Massapequa, Long Island, residence, five-year-old Alec Baldwin, the future film, stage, and television star, remembers he and his friends hearing the muffled shrieks and cries of their mothers. Racing inside his house, he was shocked when his mother told him that the president had been shot in Dallas.

Across the country, in Los Angeles, the future actor and director Rob Reiner, who was 16 but in his senior year of high school at Beverly Hills High, having skipped a grade, noticed a student enter his physics class. He whispered to the teacher, who then turned to the class and said, “I have some terrible news.”

Reiner went home and spent that weekend in late November 1963 with his famous show business parents, Carl and Estelle Reiner, camped in front of a black-and-white TV, watching the unfolding drama. It was a stunning series of events: John F. Kennedy, a young, vibrant president, assassinated; his alleged assailant murdered two days later on national television; the president’s majestic but mournful funeral, at which the first lady marched ahead of dozens of state dignitaries, including French president Charles de Gaulle and Britain’s Prince Philip.

“I’ll never forget the sound of the drums,” Reiner says, recounting the rhythmic drum cadence of the cortege. “Boomp, boomp, boomp, ba-ba-ba, boomp, boomp boomp.” He still can close his eyes and see the flag-draped coffin, the riderless horse, the steady steps and stoic demeanor of 34-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy under a black veil. “Everybody was watching this on television,” he tells me from his Los Angeles home. “We had that shared traumatic experience.”

Alec Baldwin, in a phone interview from New York City, remembers his father, a high school educator and athletics coach, driving to Washington, DC, to witness firsthand the passing of the president’s horse-drawn caisson on Pennsylvania Avenue and to hear those same dirge-like drums that Reiner heard. As practicing Roman Catholics, his family was particularly affected by the loss of America’s first Catholic president (and the only one, until Joe Biden).

Both Baldwin and Reiner have agreed to speak this week at Duquesne University’s Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law for the school’s symposium on that dark turning point in American history. I will be on hand, as well, delivering remarks as a presidential historian and lawyer, and as a confidant of Paul Landis, one of the members of the Kennedys’ Secret Service detail. (I have recently written for Vanity Fair about Landis, who, in a new book, reveals that he actually found a bullet in the president’s limo that day and placed it on the president’s stretcher. If true, his disclosure could upend the long-held theory that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman.)

The title of the conference is The JFK Assassination at 60: New Frontiers in Scientific, Medical, Legal, and Historical Research. Explains Ken Gormley, the president of the university and a respected constitutional scholar: “One of the reasons Duquesne decided to host this symposium is to allow scholars, students, and citizens to learn about this lost piece of history and formulate their own conclusions. This symposium provides a chance to examine conflicting theories, and to do so respectfully.” Among the sessions are Converging Lines of Evidence in the Case for Two Headshots, The Assassination of President Kennedy: Understanding the Cold War Context, and Why JFK’s Assassination Will Not Go Away.

Neither Baldwin nor Reiner has ever participated in such a setting. Although each has closely followed theories and scholarship surrounding the assassination, it is only now, 60 years after the tragedy, that they have stepped forward to present their views for this kind of audience.

Why? Why have they been compelled to speak out? What can possibly be learned about this national catastrophe that isn’t already known? And why do so many people still care so deeply about what Reiner refers to as the “greatest murder mystery in the history of America”?

Reiner and Baldwin both were drawn to the Duquesne seminar because of Dr. Cyril Wecht. Wecht, now 92, is a legend in JFK assassination circles. He was the coroner for Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) for much of his long career, a sometime Democratic politician, and a forensic pathologist of repute, having participated in autopsies or investigations into the deaths of Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King, Sharon Tate, and JonBenét Ramsey.

Wecht, however, has also gained renown as a dissenter: The only pathologist on the panel assembled in 1978 by the House Select Committee on Assassinations who refused to support the findings of the Warren Commission, the body created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination. Wecht never bought the panel’s single-bullet theory: the idea that one bullet passed through Kennedy’s neck and then caused all of the bone-shattering injuries to Texas governor John Connally, who was seated in front of Kennedy. Nor does Wecht support the assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy’s lone assassin.

Mounds of evidence seem to suggest that Wecht may actually be proven right. At least a lot of Kennedy scholars believe that to be the case.

But here is the problem. When is someone a scholar or true researcher into the facts—and when is someone just a kook?

Jefferson Morley, who has spent 40 years as a journalist, 15 of them with The Washington Post as a reporter and editor, is a case in point. Morley has been investigating and writing about the assassination for decades and is the editor of JFK Facts. Recently, he wrote an opinion piece for the Post on the failure of the government to turn over its remaining sealed documents, long stored in the National Archives. The article bore a rather accusatory title: “Thanks to the CIA, we might never know the full truth behind JFK’s assassination,” implying that perhaps the vaunted spy agency was either complicit or had strong motives for not wanting all the facts to come out.

Morley noted on JFK Facts that the blowback to his op-ed was enormous, castigating the Post for publishing, among other things, “the ravings of a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘manipulative scoundrel’ who is on par with (if not in league with) MAGA insurrectionists and QAnon oddballs.”

Morley felt obliged to defend himself. “For the record,” he wrote, “it is tedious but necessary to say I vaxxed my kids. I believe in masking. I supported pandemic shutdowns.” He elaborated on his bona fides, “I don’t think the 2004 or the 2020 election was stolen. My views on the CIA and JFK’s assassination derive from research and on-the-record interviews, not the cinematic mythmaking of Oliver Stone or the legal case presented by Jim Garrison, much less the lunacy of QAnon.”

The Wecht Institute has assembled a symposium roster it considers true scholars. They include Dr. Barbara Perry, professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and author of books on members of the Kennedy family and other political topics; Douglas Horne, former chief analyst for military records for Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1992 to oversee the identification and release of records related to the JFK assassination; Josiah Thompson, author of three JFK books, including the seminal 1967 work, Six Seconds in Dallas; and a host of other distinguished academics and independent researchers (whose ranks include Morley). As I mentioned, I will be making a presentation—along with Secret Service agent Landis—about his new book, The Final Witness.

And this year, the event will be joined by Rob Reiner and Alec Baldwin.

This is just the third time the Wecht Institute has delved into the JFK assassination: once in 2003 (to coincide with the 40th anniversary), again in 2013 (to mark the 5oth), and this year on the 60th. Since its founding in 2000, the institute has explored diverse programs on the intersection of forensic science and areas of study such as the collection of digital evidence, adjudicating political violence, mental health, and the law, as well as public safety, social justice, and policing in America’s streets. The whole impetus behind the creation of the institute, says Ben Wecht, Cyril’s son, a former journalist and administrator of the program, “was to achieve a greater marriage between science and law.”

All this began with Cyril Wecht himself, who was born in a small mining town in Pennsylvania to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia. He obtained his MD at the University of Pittsburgh and JD from the University of Maryland. He trained as a forensic pathologist while serving in the Air Force.

Wecht forged a path in the study of the JFK assassination that led to many of the discoveries of the key mistakes made during Kennedy’s autopsy (failing to section the back and neck wounds, the destruction of notes, and the inexplicable loss of autopsy photos and X-rays) and the corresponding flaws (some would say deceptions) of the Warren Commission (chief among them: that a single shooter was responsible for the assassination). Wecht presented a paper at the February 1966 convention of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that was critical of the Warren Report, just a year and a half after the report was issued.

Then, shockingly, in 1972, Wecht discovered that the president’s brain and slides of tissue, taken from the body during the autopsy, were missing from the National Archives. Wecht turned out to be the first critic of the Warren Report to be allowed to examine official autopsy materials. His report of the lost brain landed on the front page of The New York Times.

These bombshell discoveries and extraordinary screwups, whether through malign conduct or otherwise, are the very things that continue to cast doubt on the JFK assassination probe—and trouble people like Reiner and Baldwin.

Rob Reiner says that the revelations about the assassination have come in “dribs and drabs” over the last six decades and that is why people have a hard time placing it all into context. In a Zoom call, he takes me back to his days as a young comedian before he began his career as an actor, director, and producer. He recalls that a couple of years after the Warren Report came out, he and entertainer Joey Bishop’s son, Larry, were performing at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco as an opening act before jazz singer Carmen McRae, when Mort Sahl, the brilliant political satirist, was playing in an adjacent room. Reiner took in Sahl’s act, but instead of his normal political parody, Sahl spoke only of the Warren Report. “That’s all he talked about,” Reiner says. “That they had lied.” That was Reiner’s trigger for further inquiry.

He devoured all the books he could on the assassination. He watched all the documentaries. He eventually found himself in Dallas in Dealey Plaza reconstructing the assassination for his 2016 feature, LBJ, starring Woody Harrelson as President Johnson. “I’ve been to Dealey Plaza many, many times,” he tells me. “I’ve looked at every single angle, actually recreated the event for [the LBJ] film.” In the process of his research for the movie, Reiner ended up speaking to many JFK researchers, people like author Dick Russell (The Man Who Knew Too Much, about Richard Case Nagell), and Gaeton Fonzi, an author and investigative journalist who was hired by the Church Committee and House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Reiner remains in the thick of it. He is currently teaming up with journalist Soledad O’Brien on a 10-part podcast series for iHeartPodcasts titled Who Killed JFK? He has pored over the Zapruder film—the home movie, shot by a Dallas citizen on the route of the motorcade, that inadvertently captured the entire sequence of the assassination.

As Reiner sees it, the telltale frames of that footage indicate that the bullet that hit JFK could not have struck Governor Connally as well. He insists that “the single bullet theory”—which is a key conclusion of the Warren Report—“is where everything falls apart…. If you look at the Zapruder film, the one thing that really is clear is that the bullet that went through Kennedy’s neck didn’t hit Connally, because when you watch the film, you see that the bullet hits Kennedy, goes like this to his throat, and then you see Connally turn to his right and look back to see what’s going on, and then he gets hit. Even Connally himself said, ‘That bullet didn’t hit me.’”

At the symposium, Reiner says, he promises that if he is asked to do so, he will reveal the names of what he describes as four professional assassins who were known to be in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963—some or all of whom may or may not have had ties to various outfits such as the CIA (which may have wanted to rub out JFK for a variety of reasons), the Mafia (which was purportedly alarmed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s crackdown on their criminal operations), and a group of Cubans (believed by some to have wanted to settle scores with JFK for a supposed plot to kill President Fidel Castro).

Similarly, Alec Baldwin found he was always drawn into the enigma of the assassination. When he was 10, he says, his politically progressive father took Baldwin and his siblings to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in June 1968 to pay respects to JFK’s slain brother, Bobby, also the victim of assassination. “We stood in line on Park Avenue for several hours,” Baldwin recalls, “and made our way with everyone else into the [church] to file past RFK’s casket—to cross ourselves, kneel, and pray.”

St. Patrick’s, it turned out, would come to have additional resonance for Baldwin. It is across the street from the Rockefeller Center complex, where Baldwin would burnish his résumé on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock and set the record for the most times hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live (17 episodes).

But before all that, Baldwin began reading about the JFK assassination in high school. He remembers picking up the 1975 book, They’ve Killed the President, by Robert Sam Anson in a Massapequa 7-Eleven near his home. Within its pages he came across a photo of a dead Lee Harvey Oswald on a coroner’s table, which Baldwin stared at “in fascination and slight horror.” This, he believes, would kindle his “intense” interest in the president’s murder and marked the beginning of what he calls a “ceaseless pursuit of the truth.”

For the 50th anniversary of the slaying, Baldwin says he had assembled a notable group for a program he expected to be aired on MSNBC’s Up Late With Alec Baldwin. His guests were to include Mark Lane, the iconoclastic lawyer and author of Rush to Judgment, a best-selling 1966 exposé on the Warren Report; peace activist James Douglass, later the author of the critically acclaimed work, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters; Philip Shenon, an investigative journalist who would write A Cruel and Shocking Act, detailing the inner workings of the Warren Commission; and none other than RFK’s son Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., currently an independent candidate for the presidency.

But, as Baldwin puts it, Up Late With Alec Baldwin was “ill-fated,” and stopped airing soon before the JFK program was scheduled to be broadcast. Baldwin claims that he heard from an insider at MSNBC that “the mothership,” meaning NBC Broadcast News, did not want to put out a show that criticized the Warren Commission. (By other accounts, the show was suspended and later canceled by MSNBC after a very public dustup between Baldwin and a street photographer in the week before the 50th anniversary.) A spokesman at NBC declined to comment.

In Baldwin’s view, there were likely nefarious forces at play in the killing of JFK—beyond Lee Harvey Oswald. It wouldn’t be beyond the pale, he believes, for people within the establishment to have had their own reasons to go after Kennedy. “There is a rich history of the US government turning on its own,” he observes, citing the so-called father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. “Once he helped create the bomb, Truman and his supporters in Washington turned on him, especially given Oppenheimer’s subsequent qualms about the bomb. And in the ’60s and ’70s, some people who tried to expose the truth—like Robert Kennedy or Daniel Ellsberg—were eliminated or sidelined.”

What’s more, he says, there seem to be no consequences for those in power who employ shady means for what they perceive as justifiable ends. “Americans have come to understand that there is a bargain made: In order to have the luxuries of our society, we let those in charge cut a lot of corners and engage in ‘dirty work’ with the proviso, ‘Better you don’t know.’ No one paid the price for the Iran-Contra scandal, under Ronald Reagan. We pretended to care, but no one shed one eyedropper about the violation of law in giving arms to Nicaraguan rebels in a crazy plan to try and free American hostages held by the Iranian government.” (Several government officials involved in the plot were actually charged and convicted. And the scandal eventually tarnished the legacy of the Reagan administration.)

“American powerbrokers,” he says, “continue to operate in their interests, above the common good. ‘This country belongs to me,’ they say, ‘more than to others.’ These forces will continue to take what they want and cause events like January 6—a pure power grab—if they are not confronted. That’s a reason I continue to follow the JFK story. Because I believe in standing up against these forces. A president should be the leader of all people, not just special interests.”

Why the continuing interest in a murder that may never be solved to anyone’s satisfaction? Baldwin and Reiner give similar answers.

“The assassination was the beginning of the free fall in American political life,” Baldwin contends. It was a “point of no return,” and led to “the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, and Watergate.” It was, in short, the beginning of a time when a critical mass of the public felt they could not place full faith in statements by their own government.

Moreover, in the view of many who will be attending the symposium, there is reason to wonder if the government itself was somehow involved in the assassination or its cover-up. Baldwin thinks that powerful antidemocratic forces—those that support war and munitions and lower taxes over health and education—created an era of cynicism and partisanship that has held sway up until today. Kennedy, in this worldview, constituted a threat. So, too, his brother, then attorney general Robert F. Kennedy.

Baldwin points to a scene in Oliver Stone’s film Nixon (a film popular among cinephiles, the assassination-curious, and conspiracy theorists alike), in which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his top deputy, Clyde Tolson, are at a racetrack in the spring of 1968, when candidate Richard Nixon joins them to ask for Hoover’s help in defeating Bobby Kennedy’s rising campaign for the presidency. Hoover darkly responds that “the system can only take so much abuse. It adjusts itself eventually, but there are times, there are savage outbursts.” As a gelding horse portentously froths and snorts, Hoover adds, “We’ve already had one radical in the White House. I don’t believe we could survive another.” Bobby Kennedy’s murder in Los Angeles follows shortly thereafter.

Rob Reiner’s perspective on why the public is continually captivated by this subject mirrors Baldwin’s take. “This was the end of innocence in America,” he says. “For us, who were becoming of draft age soon, the Vietnam War was, except for the Civil War, obviously, the greatest divide ever in the history of the country. This was the beginning of the modern divide, which has gotten only worse. Because Kennedy was trying to get us out of Vietnam. He had written this memo about pulling a thousand troops out, and then having all military out by the end of 1965.” But upon taking office, LBJ, Reiner recounts, “reversed that memo and we went into Vietnam. That was a big divide in our country. There was protest all over the country for years.”

Be that as it may, Reiner thinks that the government’s loss of credibility came to a head when the war in Vietnam escalated in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Many male, college-age students in particular, who were subject to the draft, no longer believed their government. And that mistrust, says Reiner, may well have started with the Warren Report. “Something is off,” Reiner states, characterizing this mindset among skeptics back then. “The government is lying to us about something—and about the most serious thing, the murder of a president.

“I think people need to know the truth about their government and what the government has done,” he continues, “because you cannot have a healthy democracy based on falsehoods and lies. If we’re going to be the beacon to the world, if we’re going to be the shining city on the hill, and be the example of how democracy [works], of what a wonderful form of government it is, you can’t be lying to people. You have to let them know that there is ugliness about America and America’s trajectory.”

Sixty years on, scholars and citizens, progressives and conservatives, young and old are still trying to find cold, hard truths amid a blizzard of lies.