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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

NEWSNIGHT SPECIAL: Assisnation of John F. Kennedy

Aired November 22, 2003 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


AARON BROWN, HOST: For millions of Americans, there have been thre3e cataclysmic shared experiences over the last half-century, the attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York and in Washington, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and the death of a young president, November 22, 1963, 40 years ago.
John Kennedy was the country's youngest president when he took office. And although he was rather unpopular for a part of his presidency, he was also seen as a beacon for coming generations.

That he died so suddenly and violently and so publicly seemed to change America forever.

In the half-hour ahead, we're going to talk to two of the surviving investigators, one of them a former president of the United States. And you'll hear from the leading doubter of the official explanations. And we'll try to answer why, after all these years, why do so many Americans refuse to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

We'll set the stage first. It was a bright, sunny November day in Dallas. The president and his wife, Jackie, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, were riding in an open car as their motorcade made it through the heart of the city.

Their route took them past an office building that would instantly become part of history, the Texas Schoolbook Depository, where a young ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald had just gotten a job a few weeks before.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): It is an utterly unremarkable building, and yet a half a million people come to visit it every year and have for decades. They pose for snapshots not far from the grassy knoll. They teach their children of its history. They take guided tours, buy books and tapes.

But many -- most, in fact -- do not accept what history has told them.

GIGI EWING, FORT WORTH, TEXAS: There was just so much at the time that left so much doubt that I guess it's just hard to really feel that the real truth is known about it. GARY MACK, CURATOR, SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM: The public opinion polls have shown very clearly since the weekend of the assassination that fewer than 50 percent believe it was just one guy.

BROWN: One guy, a 24-year-old former Marine who purchased a mail-order rifle for $12 and change, and a scope for another $8. How could it be just one guy?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: People don't want to believe that he could have been brought down by just a street urchin, that it had to be, you know, done by some vaster conspiracy network.

BROWN: Since the assassination, more than 60 people claim to have shot the president. Since the assassination, hundreds of books have been written, all claiming Lee Harvey Oswald was aided and abetted by somebody or some greater thing -- the CIA, the Mob, anti- Castro Cubans, even LBJ.

GERALD POSNER, AUTHOR, "CASE CLOSED": Over the years, we as a country tend to lose faith in our government. We learn about the lies of Vietnam, and we have Watergate and Iran-contra. We no longer trust blue-ribbon panels like the Warren Commission to tell us the truth.

BROWN (on camera): But, of course, the truth is precisely what the Warren Commission was meant to uncover. Led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission produced these 26 volumes, narratives and evidence, encapsulated in a single finding. The commission found no evidence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

FORMER PRESIDENT GERALD R. FORD: The phone rang, and one of our children answered it. They said, The president's on the line, wants to talk to you. I got on the line. It was President Johnson. He said, Gerry, I'm trying to put together a nonpartisan commission to investigate the assassination. I want you to be a member.

BROWN (voice-over): At age 90, former president Gerald Ford is the only surviving member of the Warren Commission.

FORD: We held these hearings. They were not open, but they were thorough. And with the kind of top-notch staff we had, I was satisfied that we got all the facts as they developed.

BROWN (on camera): Why, sir, do you -- were they not open? What was the thinking?

FORD: I think it was probably the decision of the chief justice. He was more reluctant than I to undertake the responsibility, and I think he wanted the least possible publicity.

BROWN (voice-over): It was a fateful decision. Most historians, and even surviving staff members, say today that the Warren Commission hearings should have been in the open.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (R), PENNSYLVANIA: I think it would have been wiser to have had open hearings, so that there would have been public examination of the work as it went along. BROWN: Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter was a 33-year-old attorney on the commission staff and remembers a critical dispute at the 11th hour.

SPECTER: We faced a crucial moment when the chief justice did not want to print the record, and the younger members of the staff went to the members of Congress and said, We must print this record. It must be open. We printed it all. We printed 26 volumes, 17,000 pages.

BROWN: But, of course, that record wasn't the end of anything. And this man, now 76, saw to it that the Warren Commission conclusions would be not only debated, but bitterly debated, for two generations.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on this special NEWSNIGHT half hour, was there a conspiracy to kill the president?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It didn't take long, just a few weeks, in fact, before the first serious questions were being raised about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

And leading the charge was a young New York City lawyer, a man who helped direct John Kennedy's election efforts in Manhattan when he ran for president, a young criminal defense attorney named Mark Lane.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARK LANE, AUTHOR, "RUSH TO JUDGMENT": How could you eliminate the possibility of a conspiracy when the president of the United States has been killed? How do you know that somebody didn't pay this guy?

BROWN (voice-over): For 40 years now, Mark Lane has been asking that same question. Now 76 and living comfortably in southern New Jersey, his book "Rush to Judgment" is still seen as the Rosetta stone for all those who believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.

LANE: My book came out. The first Gallup poll and Harris poll taken after that showed that two-thirds of the American people were convinced that there was a conspiracy. So nobody really believed the Warren Commission report, as soon as it was possible to hear another side.

FORD: Let me tell you the two basic points that the commission decided. Number one, Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination. Number two, the commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.

BROWN: Gerald ford says that that one key phrase, "no evidence of a conspiracy," was meant to leave the door slightly ajar in the event that history would later prove there was someone else involved.

(on camera): Was there disagreement on the main points?

FORD: There was no vigorous opposition to the decision that Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination. That was unanimous. But in the 20 or 30 years that have passed since, I have seen no new credible evidence that a conspiracy existed.

BROWN: But the critics and the conspiracy advocates won't go away, and most of their doubts center around the so-called single- bullet theory, that one bullet -- this bullet right here -- the bullet the Warren Commission found badly wounded both President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally at practically the same instant.

LANE: This is what the bullet did. The bullet hit the president in the back of the neck, leaving behind a wound five inches below in his back. It exited from his throat, leaving behind what every doctor at the Parkland Memorial Hospital said was a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) wound of entrance.

It then hung out there in midair for approximately 1.8 seconds. Apparently then it observed Governor Connally seated directly in front, started up again, went into his back, shattered his ribs, made a right turn, shattered his right wrist, and then entered into his left thigh.

SPECTER: The evidence and the truth has had a hard time catching up with the distortions.

BROWN (voice-over): Senator Specter, then a junior attorney on the commission staff, is the author, the father, of the single-bullet theory.

(on camera): The single-bullet theory is pretty much the foundation of the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, shot from that building, could have fired the shots, et cetera. Can you explain how you arrived at that conclusion?

SPECTER: The bullet entered between two large strap muscles at the back of the president's neck, hit nothing solid, went through the pleural cavity, nicked his tie coming out. The evidence shows that the bullet entered slightly to the left of Governor Connally's right armpit, grazed a rib, went through his wrist, lodged in his thigh, which is an extraordinary path for a bullet, admittedly.

But truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and it all ties together factually.

BROWN (voice-over): The Warren Commission accepted the single- bullet theory, but it was never told by the CIA about one crucial fact.

WALTER CRONKITE, CBS NEWS: They never told the Warren Commission that there was a plot, that they had a plot, against the life of Castro in Cuba.

BROWN: Right. CRONKITE: And that was a motivation factor that could have led to other investigation, I think, as to whether it was possible that Castro himself or Cuban sympathizers had committed this terrible act.

BROWN (voice-over): So those who wanted to believe in a conspiracy had reasons galore to do just that.

POSNER: They think that they are on the road to uncovering a vast secret government conspiracy, involving dozens of people, from the medical work, to the autopsy doctors, to extra shooters at Dealey Plaza, to ties to Jack Ruby. It goes through the Secret Service, it affects the FBI, it has the CIA involved, often Lyndon Johnson is named. You're talking a massive effort.

BROWN: And it did get its day in court, here in this city, a city where, as one writer once said, "New Orleans is a great stage, and everyone wants to be part of the theater."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Next, the only prosecutor to bring the Kennedy assassination case to a courtroom.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Three years after John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, a young district attorney in New Orleans stunned the nation when he claimed that he knew, for a fact, who had helped conspire to kill the president.

It was a drama that would keep the country riveted for the next year. And in the process, stoked the fires of a conspiracy theory so high that they've never really died down.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): To the people who know her best, New Orleans is a city that reveres food, intrigue, and theater, and not necessarily in that order.

ROSEMARY JAMES, FORMER REPORTER, "NEW ORLEANS STATES-ITEM": The natives consider everyday life a theater. And those moving on the stage of this theater had darn well be, you know, entertaining, or they're not going to last long.

BROWN: Three years after the Kennedy assassination, there was no bigger player this man, than Jim Garrison, the city's district attorney, who shocked his city and the nation by claiming he knew who conspired to kill the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 1967)

JIM GARRISON, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW ORLEANS: I have no doubts whatsoever about the case. I said this some time ago, and I meant it.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BROWN: Acting on his own authority, Garrison arrested a 54-year- old New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw and charged him with conspiring to kill John F. Kennedy.

JAMES: One reason Garrison was, in my opinion, able to continue this farce for as long as he was able to do so is because he was very entertaining. He was very charismatic, he was a tall, big guy, pretty good-looking, you know, and he made his statements without hesitation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 1967)

CLAY SHAW, BUSINESSMAN: I'm completely innocent of any such charges. I have not conspired with anyone at any time or any place to murder our late and esteemed president John F. Kennedy or any other individual.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Lee Harvey Oswald did have some New Orleans connections. He was born and spent his youth there in a hardscrabble downtown neighborhood. And later, not long before the assassination, he was arrested here, handing out pro-Castro leaflets at a street corner.

But try as he might, Jim Garrison couldn't prove anything else. His entire case, historians say, was built on a series of lies.

JAMES: We called it the theory du jour period. Every day there was a new theory. And, you know, Garrison would always have a press conference, and he would always go into great, you know, embroidered details about why this was the correct theory. And -- but a week later, he'd have another one.

BROWN: A jury took but 45 minutes to acquit Clay Shaw. But 22 years later, filmmaker Oliver Stone brazenly cast Garrison as Chief Justice Earl Warren in the movie "JFK," a film that portrayed Garrison's claims as cinematic gospel.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "JFK")

GARRISON: ... has presented absolutely nothing publicly which would contradict our finding.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

POSNER: Oliver Stone's "JFK" is a fine film, but a terrible piece of history. But unfortunately, a whole generation not even alive at the time that Kennedy was killed know their Kennedy history from that film. So you're guaranteed a new generation have its facts completely upside down.

BROWN (on camera): The key to the mystery, for both sides -- those who believe Oswald acted alone, and those who cannot believe that -- the key is the Zapruder film, the only color film record of the assassination, certainly the most analyzed piece of film in the nation's history.

Frame by frame, 18 frames to the second, here it is at regular speed. It lasts just 26 seconds.

BRINKLEY: It's that singular moment, like Pearl Harbor and 9/1, where you remembered where you were at the moment. And it makes this a participatory event. People somehow feel that they caught it, that they saw it on the news, that I witnessed it.

BROWN: In 1978, 15 years after the assassination, many members of Congress were told, and many believed, that there was a fourth gunshot that day in Dallas. An audiotape recorded from a motorcycle policeman's radio convinced them that a conspiracy against the president was possible.

Many eyewitnesses told Congress they heard several shots as well.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What you just heard were the sounds picked up at this microphone of shots fired from here, the first two, one shot then fired from here, followed half a second later by one shot from there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN (voice-over): But any police officer will tell you that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. And in the 40 years since the assassination, science and technology have helped convince many experts that Oswald, in fact, did act alone.

POSNER: We can determine the time on the film that the two men were hit, in large part because of following a flap of John Connally's lapel at the moment that he's hit in the car. We know when the two were struck by a bullet. You can place them in a three-dimensional sense of where they were at that moment, the exact position of the two of them.

And you can then ask a computer the question, based upon the wounds that they suffered, is it possible for one bullet to have done the damage to those two men?

And as a matter of fact, it's a straight-line shot.

Now, you say, great theory, great theory, but how do we know it's true? And that's because scientists have now recreated this experiment all day long.

BROWN: Many historians believe it marked an end to an age of American innocence, and no matter what people believe about who did it, the beginning of the age of cynicism.

BRINKLEY: We lost a part of ourselves, and we've lost a part of our innocence, and we were followed by two presidents who did nothing but lie to us constantly. Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam and Nixon on Vietnam-slash-politics Watergate.

And a lot of people look back and say, God, it all changed went that bullet hit the president in Dallas. We lost something as a country.

And that's jarring. And it's like 9/11. When that happens, you don't know what it means fully, but you know that the world will never be the same again.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on this NEWSNIGHT special, a conversation with Walter Cronkite about that horrible day in Dallas.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

For Americans of a certain age, it was a day to dread and, of course, a day to remember. And guiding millions of Americans through that horrible day was one man, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite.

We sat down with Mr. Cronkite recently to talk and to remember.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER CRONKITE: I compare us with something we've only learned in recent years about the trauma that is suffered by hospital and other emergency workers, hospital staffs and firemen, policemen, who go through the terrible human tragedy of people dying right in their hands, practically, being carried burned from a building, whatever the story is, shot on the streets.

At that time, the job is everything. You've got to concentrate on doing what you're supposed to do and are trained to do. And I think the same thing is true of us newspeople, because I had no personal sense of tragedy in this thing until the moment when I had to say he was dead.

BROWN: Right, and that moment, people will remember perhaps as well as any moment in their lifetime.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, November 22, 1963)

CRONKITE: From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard time, 2:00 Eastern Standard time, some 38 minutes ago.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: You take off your glasses, and you wipe a tear.

CRONKITE: Yes.

BROWN: How do you -- when you think about that moment now, 40 years later, would do you it differently?

CRONKITE: Probably not. Because that moment was purely extemporaneous in every sense of the word. It -- I certainly -- it wasn't -- I hadn't planned to have a tear in my eye at that moment at all. I wouldn't have thought of that. I would never have yielded to that if it had been a thought. BROWN: Do you regret it?

CRONKITE: No, I don't regret it at all. I -- not at all. I would have regretted it if I had broken down and couldn't have continued. That I would have regretted.

But this brief show of emotion was something that I think is perfectly natural, and I don't blame an on-air person for showing emotion. It seems to me that you really don't want people reporting to you who don't have any sense of the emotional impact of a given moment in history.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: That's our look at the Kennedy assassination 40 years later.

Thanks for joining us. I'm Aaron Brown.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com






Aired November 22, 2003 - 09:30   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, HOST: For millions of Americans, there have been thre3e cataclysmic shared experiences over the last half-century, the attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York and in Washington, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and the death of a young president, November 22, 1963, 40 years ago.
John Kennedy was the country's youngest president when he took office. And although he was rather unpopular for a part of his presidency, he was also seen as a beacon for coming generations.

That he died so suddenly and violently and so publicly seemed to change America forever.

In the half-hour ahead, we're going to talk to two of the surviving investigators, one of them a former president of the United States. And you'll hear from the leading doubter of the official explanations. And we'll try to answer why, after all these years, why do so many Americans refuse to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

We'll set the stage first. It was a bright, sunny November day in Dallas. The president and his wife, Jackie, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, were riding in an open car as their motorcade made it through the heart of the city.

Their route took them past an office building that would instantly become part of history, the Texas Schoolbook Depository, where a young ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald had just gotten a job a few weeks before.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): It is an utterly unremarkable building, and yet a half a million people come to visit it every year and have for decades. They pose for snapshots not far from the grassy knoll. They teach their children of its history. They take guided tours, buy books and tapes.

But many -- most, in fact -- do not accept what history has told them.

GIGI EWING, FORT WORTH, TEXAS: There was just so much at the time that left so much doubt that I guess it's just hard to really feel that the real truth is known about it. GARY MACK, CURATOR, SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM: The public opinion polls have shown very clearly since the weekend of the assassination that fewer than 50 percent believe it was just one guy.

BROWN: One guy, a 24-year-old former Marine who purchased a mail-order rifle for $12 and change, and a scope for another $8. How could it be just one guy?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: People don't want to believe that he could have been brought down by just a street urchin, that it had to be, you know, done by some vaster conspiracy network.

BROWN: Since the assassination, more than 60 people claim to have shot the president. Since the assassination, hundreds of books have been written, all claiming Lee Harvey Oswald was aided and abetted by somebody or some greater thing -- the CIA, the Mob, anti- Castro Cubans, even LBJ.

GERALD POSNER, AUTHOR, "CASE CLOSED": Over the years, we as a country tend to lose faith in our government. We learn about the lies of Vietnam, and we have Watergate and Iran-contra. We no longer trust blue-ribbon panels like the Warren Commission to tell us the truth.

BROWN (on camera): But, of course, the truth is precisely what the Warren Commission was meant to uncover. Led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission produced these 26 volumes, narratives and evidence, encapsulated in a single finding. The commission found no evidence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

FORMER PRESIDENT GERALD R. FORD: The phone rang, and one of our children answered it. They said, The president's on the line, wants to talk to you. I got on the line. It was President Johnson. He said, Gerry, I'm trying to put together a nonpartisan commission to investigate the assassination. I want you to be a member.

BROWN (voice-over): At age 90, former president Gerald Ford is the only surviving member of the Warren Commission.

FORD: We held these hearings. They were not open, but they were thorough. And with the kind of top-notch staff we had, I was satisfied that we got all the facts as they developed.

BROWN (on camera): Why, sir, do you -- were they not open? What was the thinking?

FORD: I think it was probably the decision of the chief justice. He was more reluctant than I to undertake the responsibility, and I think he wanted the least possible publicity.

BROWN (voice-over): It was a fateful decision. Most historians, and even surviving staff members, say today that the Warren Commission hearings should have been in the open.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (R), PENNSYLVANIA: I think it would have been wiser to have had open hearings, so that there would have been public examination of the work as it went along. BROWN: Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter was a 33-year-old attorney on the commission staff and remembers a critical dispute at the 11th hour.

SPECTER: We faced a crucial moment when the chief justice did not want to print the record, and the younger members of the staff went to the members of Congress and said, We must print this record. It must be open. We printed it all. We printed 26 volumes, 17,000 pages.

BROWN: But, of course, that record wasn't the end of anything. And this man, now 76, saw to it that the Warren Commission conclusions would be not only debated, but bitterly debated, for two generations.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on this special NEWSNIGHT half hour, was there a conspiracy to kill the president?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It didn't take long, just a few weeks, in fact, before the first serious questions were being raised about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

And leading the charge was a young New York City lawyer, a man who helped direct John Kennedy's election efforts in Manhattan when he ran for president, a young criminal defense attorney named Mark Lane.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARK LANE, AUTHOR, "RUSH TO JUDGMENT": How could you eliminate the possibility of a conspiracy when the president of the United States has been killed? How do you know that somebody didn't pay this guy?

BROWN (voice-over): For 40 years now, Mark Lane has been asking that same question. Now 76 and living comfortably in southern New Jersey, his book "Rush to Judgment" is still seen as the Rosetta stone for all those who believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.

LANE: My book came out. The first Gallup poll and Harris poll taken after that showed that two-thirds of the American people were convinced that there was a conspiracy. So nobody really believed the Warren Commission report, as soon as it was possible to hear another side.

FORD: Let me tell you the two basic points that the commission decided. Number one, Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination. Number two, the commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.

BROWN: Gerald ford says that that one key phrase, "no evidence of a conspiracy," was meant to leave the door slightly ajar in the event that history would later prove there was someone else involved.

(on camera): Was there disagreement on the main points?

FORD: There was no vigorous opposition to the decision that Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination. That was unanimous. But in the 20 or 30 years that have passed since, I have seen no new credible evidence that a conspiracy existed.

BROWN: But the critics and the conspiracy advocates won't go away, and most of their doubts center around the so-called single- bullet theory, that one bullet -- this bullet right here -- the bullet the Warren Commission found badly wounded both President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally at practically the same instant.

LANE: This is what the bullet did. The bullet hit the president in the back of the neck, leaving behind a wound five inches below in his back. It exited from his throat, leaving behind what every doctor at the Parkland Memorial Hospital said was a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) wound of entrance.

It then hung out there in midair for approximately 1.8 seconds. Apparently then it observed Governor Connally seated directly in front, started up again, went into his back, shattered his ribs, made a right turn, shattered his right wrist, and then entered into his left thigh.

SPECTER: The evidence and the truth has had a hard time catching up with the distortions.

BROWN (voice-over): Senator Specter, then a junior attorney on the commission staff, is the author, the father, of the single-bullet theory.

(on camera): The single-bullet theory is pretty much the foundation of the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, shot from that building, could have fired the shots, et cetera. Can you explain how you arrived at that conclusion?

SPECTER: The bullet entered between two large strap muscles at the back of the president's neck, hit nothing solid, went through the pleural cavity, nicked his tie coming out. The evidence shows that the bullet entered slightly to the left of Governor Connally's right armpit, grazed a rib, went through his wrist, lodged in his thigh, which is an extraordinary path for a bullet, admittedly.

But truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and it all ties together factually.

BROWN (voice-over): The Warren Commission accepted the single- bullet theory, but it was never told by the CIA about one crucial fact.

WALTER CRONKITE, CBS NEWS: They never told the Warren Commission that there was a plot, that they had a plot, against the life of Castro in Cuba.

BROWN: Right. CRONKITE: And that was a motivation factor that could have led to other investigation, I think, as to whether it was possible that Castro himself or Cuban sympathizers had committed this terrible act.

BROWN (voice-over): So those who wanted to believe in a conspiracy had reasons galore to do just that.

POSNER: They think that they are on the road to uncovering a vast secret government conspiracy, involving dozens of people, from the medical work, to the autopsy doctors, to extra shooters at Dealey Plaza, to ties to Jack Ruby. It goes through the Secret Service, it affects the FBI, it has the CIA involved, often Lyndon Johnson is named. You're talking a massive effort.

BROWN: And it did get its day in court, here in this city, a city where, as one writer once said, "New Orleans is a great stage, and everyone wants to be part of the theater."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Next, the only prosecutor to bring the Kennedy assassination case to a courtroom.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Three years after John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, a young district attorney in New Orleans stunned the nation when he claimed that he knew, for a fact, who had helped conspire to kill the president.

It was a drama that would keep the country riveted for the next year. And in the process, stoked the fires of a conspiracy theory so high that they've never really died down.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): To the people who know her best, New Orleans is a city that reveres food, intrigue, and theater, and not necessarily in that order.

ROSEMARY JAMES, FORMER REPORTER, "NEW ORLEANS STATES-ITEM": The natives consider everyday life a theater. And those moving on the stage of this theater had darn well be, you know, entertaining, or they're not going to last long.

BROWN: Three years after the Kennedy assassination, there was no bigger player this man, than Jim Garrison, the city's district attorney, who shocked his city and the nation by claiming he knew who conspired to kill the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 1967)

JIM GARRISON, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW ORLEANS: I have no doubts whatsoever about the case. I said this some time ago, and I meant it.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BROWN: Acting on his own authority, Garrison arrested a 54-year- old New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw and charged him with conspiring to kill John F. Kennedy.

JAMES: One reason Garrison was, in my opinion, able to continue this farce for as long as he was able to do so is because he was very entertaining. He was very charismatic, he was a tall, big guy, pretty good-looking, you know, and he made his statements without hesitation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 1967)

CLAY SHAW, BUSINESSMAN: I'm completely innocent of any such charges. I have not conspired with anyone at any time or any place to murder our late and esteemed president John F. Kennedy or any other individual.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Lee Harvey Oswald did have some New Orleans connections. He was born and spent his youth there in a hardscrabble downtown neighborhood. And later, not long before the assassination, he was arrested here, handing out pro-Castro leaflets at a street corner.

But try as he might, Jim Garrison couldn't prove anything else. His entire case, historians say, was built on a series of lies.

JAMES: We called it the theory du jour period. Every day there was a new theory. And, you know, Garrison would always have a press conference, and he would always go into great, you know, embroidered details about why this was the correct theory. And -- but a week later, he'd have another one.

BROWN: A jury took but 45 minutes to acquit Clay Shaw. But 22 years later, filmmaker Oliver Stone brazenly cast Garrison as Chief Justice Earl Warren in the movie "JFK," a film that portrayed Garrison's claims as cinematic gospel.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "JFK")

GARRISON: ... has presented absolutely nothing publicly which would contradict our finding.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

POSNER: Oliver Stone's "JFK" is a fine film, but a terrible piece of history. But unfortunately, a whole generation not even alive at the time that Kennedy was killed know their Kennedy history from that film. So you're guaranteed a new generation have its facts completely upside down.

BROWN (on camera): The key to the mystery, for both sides -- those who believe Oswald acted alone, and those who cannot believe that -- the key is the Zapruder film, the only color film record of the assassination, certainly the most analyzed piece of film in the nation's history.

Frame by frame, 18 frames to the second, here it is at regular speed. It lasts just 26 seconds.

BRINKLEY: It's that singular moment, like Pearl Harbor and 9/1, where you remembered where you were at the moment. And it makes this a participatory event. People somehow feel that they caught it, that they saw it on the news, that I witnessed it.

BROWN: In 1978, 15 years after the assassination, many members of Congress were told, and many believed, that there was a fourth gunshot that day in Dallas. An audiotape recorded from a motorcycle policeman's radio convinced them that a conspiracy against the president was possible.

Many eyewitnesses told Congress they heard several shots as well.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What you just heard were the sounds picked up at this microphone of shots fired from here, the first two, one shot then fired from here, followed half a second later by one shot from there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN (voice-over): But any police officer will tell you that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. And in the 40 years since the assassination, science and technology have helped convince many experts that Oswald, in fact, did act alone.

POSNER: We can determine the time on the film that the two men were hit, in large part because of following a flap of John Connally's lapel at the moment that he's hit in the car. We know when the two were struck by a bullet. You can place them in a three-dimensional sense of where they were at that moment, the exact position of the two of them.

And you can then ask a computer the question, based upon the wounds that they suffered, is it possible for one bullet to have done the damage to those two men?

And as a matter of fact, it's a straight-line shot.

Now, you say, great theory, great theory, but how do we know it's true? And that's because scientists have now recreated this experiment all day long.

BROWN: Many historians believe it marked an end to an age of American innocence, and no matter what people believe about who did it, the beginning of the age of cynicism.

BRINKLEY: We lost a part of ourselves, and we've lost a part of our innocence, and we were followed by two presidents who did nothing but lie to us constantly. Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam and Nixon on Vietnam-slash-politics Watergate.

And a lot of people look back and say, God, it all changed went that bullet hit the president in Dallas. We lost something as a country.

And that's jarring. And it's like 9/11. When that happens, you don't know what it means fully, but you know that the world will never be the same again.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on this NEWSNIGHT special, a conversation with Walter Cronkite about that horrible day in Dallas.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

For Americans of a certain age, it was a day to dread and, of course, a day to remember. And guiding millions of Americans through that horrible day was one man, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite.

We sat down with Mr. Cronkite recently to talk and to remember.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER CRONKITE: I compare us with something we've only learned in recent years about the trauma that is suffered by hospital and other emergency workers, hospital staffs and firemen, policemen, who go through the terrible human tragedy of people dying right in their hands, practically, being carried burned from a building, whatever the story is, shot on the streets.

At that time, the job is everything. You've got to concentrate on doing what you're supposed to do and are trained to do. And I think the same thing is true of us newspeople, because I had no personal sense of tragedy in this thing until the moment when I had to say he was dead.

BROWN: Right, and that moment, people will remember perhaps as well as any moment in their lifetime.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, November 22, 1963)

CRONKITE: From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard time, 2:00 Eastern Standard time, some 38 minutes ago.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: You take off your glasses, and you wipe a tear.

CRONKITE: Yes.

BROWN: How do you -- when you think about that moment now, 40 years later, would do you it differently?

CRONKITE: Probably not. Because that moment was purely extemporaneous in every sense of the word. It -- I certainly -- it wasn't -- I hadn't planned to have a tear in my eye at that moment at all. I wouldn't have thought of that. I would never have yielded to that if it had been a thought. BROWN: Do you regret it?

CRONKITE: No, I don't regret it at all. I -- not at all. I would have regretted it if I had broken down and couldn't have continued. That I would have regretted.

But this brief show of emotion was something that I think is perfectly natural, and I don't blame an on-air person for showing emotion. It seems to me that you really don't want people reporting to you who don't have any sense of the emotional impact of a given moment in history.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: That's our look at the Kennedy assassination 40 years later.

Thanks for joining us. I'm Aaron Brown.

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