And this 12 months, the occasion can be joined by Rob Reiner and Alec Baldwin.
That is simply the third time the Wecht Institute has delved into the JFK assassination: as soon as in 2003 (to coincide with the fortieth anniversary), once more in 2013 (to mark the 5oth), and this 12 months on the sixtieth. Since its founding in 2000, the institute has explored various applications on the intersection of forensic science and areas of examine akin to the gathering of digital proof, adjudicating political violence, psychological well being, and the regulation, in addition to public security, social justice, and policing in America’s streets. The entire impetus behind the creation of the institute, says Ben Wecht, Cyril’s son, a former journalist and administrator of this system, “was to realize a higher marriage between science and regulation.”
All this started with Cyril Wecht himself, who was born in a small mining city in Pennsylvania to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia. He obtained his MD on the College of Pittsburgh and JD from the College of Maryland. He skilled as a forensic pathologist whereas serving within the Air Pressure.
Wecht cast a path within the examine of the JFK assassination that led to lots of the discoveries of the important thing errors made throughout Kennedy’s post-mortem (failing to part the again and neck wounds, the destruction of notes, and the inexplicable lack of post-mortem photographs and X-rays) and the corresponding flaws (some would say deceptions) of the Warren Fee (chief amongst them: {that a} single shooter was accountable for the assassination). Wecht offered a paper on the February 1966 conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that was crucial of the Warren Report, only a 12 months and a half after the report was issued.
Then, shockingly, in 1972, Wecht found that the president’s mind and slides of tissue, taken from the physique through the post-mortem, have been lacking from the Nationwide Archives. Wecht turned out to be the primary critic of the Warren Report back to be allowed to look at official post-mortem supplies. His report of the misplaced mind landed on the entrance web page of The New York Instances.
These bombshell discoveries and extraordinary screwups, whether or not via malign conduct or in any other case, are the very issues that proceed to forged doubt on the JFK assassination probe—and bother individuals like Reiner and Baldwin.
Rob Reiner says that the revelations concerning the assassination have are available in “dribs and drabs” over the past six a long time and that’s the reason individuals have a tough time inserting all of it into context. In a Zoom name, he takes me again to his days as a younger comic earlier than he started his profession as an actor, director, and producer. He recollects that a few years after the Warren Report got here out, he and entertainer Joey Bishop’s son, Larry, have been performing on the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco as a gap act earlier than jazz singer Carmen McRae, when Mort Sahl, the good political satirist, was enjoying in an adjoining room. Reiner took in Sahl’s act, however as a substitute of his regular political parody, Sahl spoke solely of the Warren Report. “That’s all he talked about,” Reiner says. “That that they had lied.” That was Reiner’s set off for additional inquiry.
He devoured all of the books he might on the assassination. He watched all of the documentaries. He finally discovered himself in Dallas in Dealey Plaza reconstructing the assassination for his 2016 characteristic, LBJ, starring Woody Harrelson as President Johnson. “I’ve been to Dealey Plaza many, many occasions,” he tells me. “I’ve checked out each single angle, really recreated the occasion for [the LBJ] movie.” Within the means of his analysis for the film, Reiner ended up talking to many JFK researchers, individuals like creator Dick Russell (The Man Who Knew Too A lot, about Richard Case Nagell), and Gaeton Fonzi, an creator and investigative journalist who was employed by the Church Committee and Home Choose Committee on Assassinations.
Reiner stays within the thick of it. He’s presently teaming up with journalist Soledad O’Brien on a 10-part podcast collection for iHeartPodcasts titled Who Killed JFK? He has pored over the Zapruder movie—the house film, shot by a Dallas citizen on the route of the motorcade, that inadvertently captured all the sequence of the assassination.
As Reiner sees it, the telltale frames of that footage point out that the bullet that hit JFK couldn’t have struck Governor Connally as nicely. He insists that “the one bullet principle”—which is a key conclusion of the Warren Report—“is the place every little thing falls aside…. In the event you have a look at the Zapruder movie, the one factor that basically is obvious is that the bullet that went via Kennedy’s neck didn’t hit Connally, as a result of whenever you watch the movie, you see that the bullet hits Kennedy, goes like this to his throat, and then you definately see Connally flip to his proper and look again to see what’s happening, after which he will get hit. Even Connally himself stated, ‘That bullet didn’t hit me.’”
