Welcome to the second part of this bonus episode of our History Extra conspiracy series

on the assassination of JFK. If you've not heard them already, then please do check out the first half of this interview and our original episode from the series before diving into this one.

So as before, I was joined by Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK,

to tackle some more big questions around the events of 1963. So let's rejoin the conversation.

One thing I'd be interested to know, are there many of the prominent figures related to this case who believed in a conspiracy?

For example, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy family, J. Edgar Hoover.

Did any of these people actually believe there'd been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy? Yeah, absolutely. As a matter of fact, LBJ, the Lyndon Johnson, the successor

to Jack Kennedy, thought until his dying day that Castro was behind it, and it probably

got in Kennedy. He knew about the efforts to kill Castro and thought that Castro killed

Kennedy first.

He was happy to accept the conclusion that it was Oswald alone when the Warren Commission

presented it because he didn't want to go to World War III and he knew there was no way that

he could go in and obliterate Cuba, at that time, a very staunch ally of Nikita Cruz

Jeff in the Soviet Union without the Soviets retaliating.

Bobby Kennedy for a long time had questions about the mafia. He wondered if he, and also about

Castro, whether he may have inadvertently caused his brother's death by that involvement. And I think

he grudgingly came to believe after a number of years that it was very likely Oswald alone, but still was very frustrated by that.

Jackie Kennedy, it's never clear because she never spoke about it exactly how she felt.

Now, I'm not surprised by that.

Most Americans thought it was a conspiracy soon after the assassination because of the fact that Oswald was dead.

And then when the Warren Commission came out a year later and said, by the way, this year,

2024 will be the 60th anniversary of the Warren Commission.

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