Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (35 page)

It [joining the clergy] was a very tough decision, but I’d thought about it for years. If the Church allowed married priests, I’d have been a priest a long time ago. My wife endorsed it. Toward the end of her life, she knew she was dying, she told me, “Look, better God than another woman. Have at it.”

Robert Groden

Turning eighteen on the day of JFK’s assassination—at home, playing hooky from Forest Hills High School—Robert Groden was so moved by the tragedy that he decided to devote his life to exposing what he believed to be a government conspiracy. In the ensuing years he “liberated” a copy of the Zapruder film from Time-Life, keeping it in a safe for five years before showing it on the college circuit with comedian-activist Dick Gregory. They brought the film to Geraldo Rivera, who broadcast it on national television for the first time in 1975, which caused an uproar and helped lead to the 1978 formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He has coauthored a number of assassination conspiracy books and worked as Oliver Stone’s chief Dallas consultant on
JFK.
On most days he can be found near the grassy knoll, discussing his theories and selling his publications and videos to visitors.

B
ack in the ’60s I wasn’t into politics per se, but I was fascinated by history, especially questions of history, and when this happened on my eighteenth birthday, I gravitated to it immediately. I’ve been working on this case since the day it happened and am still doing it now forty-nine years later.

I admired President Kennedy. My family were all Republicans. It was President Kennedy who made me realize that it’s not the party but the president, the man, who really creates the office, and I admired him, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was absolutely shocked; I took it very personally when he was killed, so I started studying it, and a little while later I visited his gravesite and made a promise to him, a silent promise that I would do everything within my power for as long as it
took to try to find the truth—because even at the beginning, I didn’t believe that one person did it alone.

The president was set up; he was brought here to Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald was given the job in the Depository. He had always shown up for work, he had never missed a day’s work. They knew he’d be here, so it was easy to blame him. Shots came from the front, they came from the rear. The president was killed; Governor Connally was injured, whether on purpose or by accident we don’t really know. Immediately, when the president was taken to Parkland Hospital, the witnesses there, dozens and dozens—the ones that saw the head shot—all said that the shot came from the front. They were unanimous about it at the time; nobody said anything differently. The throat shot and the head shot came from the front. That alone should lead us to want to know more.

[Who did it?] I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is the House [Select] Committee [on Assassinations] after three years said it was the Mob. The Senate Intelligence Committee implied that it was the covert actions branch of the CIA. A lot of people have stated that Lyndon Johnson was involved in it. I don’t know that he was—maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t—but that issue is there. I don’t think it was the Russians. I don’t think it was the Cubans. Our issue in this case has never been to try to find out who wanted the president dead. We know that. The question is to find out who succeeded.

I worked for a company in New York. We did some optical work on the [Zapruder] film for
Life
magazine. We blew it up from 8mm to 35mm. I obtained an extra copy—one that was supposed to be thrown away and wasn’t, and it was given to me. I worked on it myself at night, in
the middle of the night, on my own time, at my own expense. I stabilized the film. I took the original film, which was very shaky, and I stabilized on the president’s head and just shot one frame at a time until the film was over. When I ran it back, it was obvious that the president had been shot from the front. You see the bullet enter the right temple area, and the president’s thrown to the rear and to the left. There was no question that he was shot from the front.

I use the word “liberated” because the Zapruder film should not have been in private ownership from the very beginning. It is the single most important piece of evidence in the Kennedy case. That, and the next thing after that is the medical witnesses. I have eighty-seven medical witnesses who said that the shot came from the front. That’s very important; I can’t throw that aside just in favor of the Zapruder film; but they’re both very important.

They [the autopsy photographs] needed to be out there; they were illegally classified in the first place. There was a game played between the Kennedy family and the government to hide the autopsy photographs. The government didn’t want anyone to see them for political reasons. The Kennedy family didn’t want them seen for personal reasons. So they made a deal together where the Kennedy family gave the photographs to the government on paper.

Then the government gave it back to the Kennedy family. The Kennedy family then gave it under a deed of trust to the National Archives. These are pictures that are key evidence in the Kennedy case. There were 152 pictures originally, now there’s only about fifteen of them left. Ninety percent of them have disappeared from the National Archives. That’s pretty weird. Not only are they missing, but the president’s brain is missing, the skull fragments are missing, the microscopic slides that
were created of the wound margins, they’re missing. How can they be gone? These were left in the National Archives for safekeeping for history. They’re all gone.

Back in 1975, I was asked to appear at a symposium in Boston called the Politics of Conspiracy; I showed the Zapruder film there, and it was picked up as a major news story by all the networks. I received a phone call from Geraldo Rivera while I was testifying about this to the Rockefeller Commission. Would I appear on his show,
Goodnight America,
and show the film of the assassination?

I immediately agreed, and we showed it. Two days later I received a call from Washington, DC, to please bring the evidence down and show it to the House of Representatives, and I did. To my absolute amazement, Congressman Thomas Downing of Virginia introduced legislation just a few days later to reopen the case. Then he called me up and asked if I would be the staff photographic consultant to the committee. I agreed, but my showing the film on
Goodnight America
was a very iffy thing. We didn’t know if there would be any legal repercussions. As it turns out,
Life
magazine, which owned the film at the time, said we couldn’t show it. Their lawyers sent a letter to ABC saying, “You can’t show it,” and Geraldo said, “We’re showing it, or get yourself a new boy.” So we showed it.

The last official investigation was the House Assassinations Committee, and they ruled that there was a conspiracy. They knew it. Every single one of the doctors at one time or another, usually through their whole careers, said that the fatal shot came from the front—all of them. But it was [an entry wound at the throat]. Dr. Robert McClelland, he’s still alive. He’s the one who was standing at the president’s head, and he said that the shot came from the front. When I worked for the House Assassinations Committee, I interviewed more than twenty of the doctors. I’ve got the videotaped interviews with all of them, and every single one of them said that the shot came from the front. Every one.

They never looked into who the front shooter was. They never tried to find out. The question is: Who was the shooter from behind? You want to believe it’s Oswald? Fine. I don’t believe it was Oswald. I found a witness who testified to the Warren Commission; her name was Geraldine Reid. She was talking to Oswald when the shots went off. She’s the one who
made the change for him for the Cola-Cola machine on the second floor. There are two basic questions: Was there a conspiracy, or wasn’t there? Was Oswald a shooter or the shooter? Do you believe he shot the policeman? Officer Tippit was killed with an automatic. Oswald had a revolver.

This is a controversy that’s been going on now for half a century. People believe what they want to believe. I believe what the evidence shows. I worked for the House Assassinations Committee; I testified before every investigation since the Warren Commission. I worked on the inside. I saw what went on, and I saw what the evidence was. If you don’t want to believe there was a conspiracy, fine—because I’m not going to change your mind. But the evidence is there that it was a conspiracy, and the government admits it.

The Warren Commission was a cover-up. There’s no question about that. The reason for it, I believe, is that they were presented with the option of admitting a conspiracy and following the evidence that Fidel Castro was behind it. If they’d have done that, then we would be forced to go after Castro, and that would probably lead to World War III.

The main issues in this case are not so much, “Was Clay Shaw guilty or not guilty?” We may never know that completely. I believe he was; I believe he took a tremendous chance by lying at the trial, saying he didn’t work for the CIA when he did. I always have to wonder,
Why did he do that if in fact he didn’t have something to hide?
In any case, the main issue here is: Was there a conspiracy? And as a side issue: Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of that conspiracy? I don’t know that we’ll ever know the complete truth, but we do know there was a conspiracy, that there was more than one shooter. How deep does the conspiracy go, how wide? We don’t know, and thanks to the cover-ups that have gone on through the years, we may never know. But we do know there was more than one shooter.

Some of the original broadcasts on television and radio were giving different stories, different aspects of this, than what came out even later that afternoon. There was a situation where a major network, as a matter of fact NBC, stated that a man was seen running
behind an office building across some railroad tracks. I’m from New York, and in New York everything is a grid, so in my mind’s eye I had pictures of buildings right next to each other and railroad tracks running behind it. We hadn’t seen any pictures of the knoll then; we didn’t know about Dealey Plaza. Clearly we’ve got the depository building here, and there are the railroad tracks. The man they were chasing was over there. That disappeared, and it was years and years until that broadcast again. That made me start to wonder: If the guy is up there, how is he running over here at the same time? It didn’t fit.

I can’t answer for you the actual reason I’ve spent half a century doing this. I admired President Kennedy. The world changed, America changed, everything changed because of this particular event. I felt it was important to do it. I just gravitated to it, and I’ve been doing it ever since. If I would have lost interest in it, I don’t know what . . . I probably would have done something else. But I really felt this was important. It gave me a mission in life, and I feel it’s important to everybody. We have been lied to for so many years, and it wasn’t until the House Assassinations Committee that we learned the truth.

The truth was: There was more than one shooter. Whether you believe Oswald was involved in it or not, there was more than one person firing, and that means conspiracy. People still deny it, and it’s beyond me. More than 70 to 80 percent of the American people have always believed that there was more than one shooter, and they were right. Yet the majority of the news stories that we’ve gotten through the years tell us a different story against the evidence. What can I say? I need to do this.

Children, teenagers in school, aren’t being taught the issues of the assassination. They’re being told the original Warren Commission story: Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone killed the president. It’s not true—but the teachers don’t seem to care, and the textbooks are inaccurate. It took years and years for even the
Encyclopedia Britannica
to change it from “Oswald the assassin” to “He was the alleged assassin.” I wrote to them, and they said, “You’re right,” and they changed it. Now it says, “alleged assassin,” which is closer to the truth. There’s not much I can say about kids, except when they come out here in the plaza, many of them, even little kids, are fascinated by it. They look around; they have questions.
We’ve had kids, eight- and ten-year-olds, that know more about this than most adults do.

I started doing this in 1963. I never stopped; and here it is forty-nine, nearly fifty years later, and I’m still doing it. I don’t know anyone else who’s still doing it. I know there are people who are alive that care about the case who were doing it back then too, but I have an advantage—I was only eighteen when this happened, so I started a lot younger than most of the other serious researchers in the case, and nearly all of them are dead. I think there are fewer than a dozen original researchers in the world still left alive, probably far fewer than a dozen.