​What inspired you to consider the legacies and assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy all in one film project?

 

This has been a topic we have been engaged with all our adult lives in one form or another. The assassinations of the 1960s marked a major turning point in American history. We have long felt that the world we live in today flows directly out of those cataclysmic murders. The massive escalation of US involvement in Vietnam and the continuation of the Cold War was a direct result of the assassination of President Kennedy; the murders that followed removed the last hopes of an earlier end to those mad endeavors. Civil rights, economic justice, and democracy suffered near-fatal wounds from these killings and their brazenly fraudulent cover-ups.  

 

Over seven years ago, our executive producer Mark Gorton asked the question: “What do the children of the major assassinated figures of the 1960s think about what happened to their fathers?”

 

As we set out to film the answer, the scope of the project expanded greatly.  

 

The series contains over 120 interviews, with more in the offing. What is your process of selecting interview subjects?

 

As the project took flight, not only did we seek out the children of the assassinated, but their surviving colleagues, friends, witnesses to their murders…and even their enemies. While we wanted to keep the focus on people who had a personal connection, we also spoke with many of the surviving first-generation citizen-researchers who took it upon themselves to find the truth. To round out the epic story that has emerged, we interviewed a select group of writers and historians.  

 

To find important characters, we looked to authors like Jim Douglass and David Talbot for guidance, and often, one interview would lead us to the next. To prepare for the interviews, we read anything and everything by or about our subject, with the result that we have read hundreds of books and articles for this project.

 

But we have more interviews from all these categories to go!

 

What’s new or noteworthy about your approach to this material? 

 

We are the first major film project to consider all four assassinations together. In doing so, the connections between them begin to emerge, starting with the populist concerns the four men shared in common. The question quickly arises: What were these men doing in the months and years before they were killed that might have enraged and frightened people in power? 

 

It turns out, though this has been hidden by mainstream histories and the press, that each of them was engaged in a pitched battle with the American establishment to give “power to the people.” There is abundant evidence that they were all killed in state-sponsored assassinations due to the threat they posed. Many of the same individual suspects show up in each murder.

 

To approach these cases, we borrowed two concepts from Vince Salandria, the godfather of Kennedy assassination researchers: the “honest government” test and the idea of a “false mystery.”

 

The honest government test is simple. We ask a straightforward question about the government’s behavior: Would an honest government lose or destroy evidence, ignore eyewitness testimony that didn’t fit its hastily constructed narrative, announce that the crime had been solved before any real investigation had begun, or allow as is the case in President Kennedy’s assassination, the alleged perpetrator to be killed while in police custody, thus destroying the possibility of a trial in the most important murder case of the 20th century?  

 

The idea of a “false mystery” in a nutshell is this: anyone who looks at the facts of these assassinations with an open mind quickly realizes that the official stories are bogus, that the government and its allies in the media, big business, and organized crime are actually to blame, and that taking the seemingly neutral position of calling the killings a “mystery” is a way to evade responsibility for doing anything about it.  

 

We soon learned that the real mystery isn’t who did it. It’s what are we going to do now? 

 

Can you share any surprises or revelations during the interviews that you did not expect?

 

Despite having been well-steeped in this material for years before we began this project, we have been continuously amazed and often shocked by the things we are learning. Who knew that Dr. King had a brother who was also the victim of a probable assassination? 

 

How many people realize that the renowned L.A. coroner, Thomas Noguchi, was fired for refusing to retract what he knew to be true: that Robert Kennedy was shot from behind at point-blank range? That inarguable scientific fact exonerates the man sitting to this very day in prison for his murder.

 

Who knew Malcolm X spoke publicly about the Texas oil billionaire who not only funded Malcolm’s former black separatist group but was also intimately connected to the Kennedy assassination? 

 

We were amazed to discover that Life Magazine released four separate editions of the same issue, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to stop the presses and reset the type to get the government’s story of JFK’s assassination to match the frames of the Zapruder film. This is a “scoop” for the project; prior researchers had found three versions, which was crazy enough; we found another one.  

 

Most amazing of all, however, has been to discover the brilliant words and truly heroic deeds of these four great Americans. They each knew they were likely candidates for assassination, but that didn’t stop them from following the dictates of their conscience. In previews, people have been blown away by the moral force and erudition of their rhetoric, which has gone missing from today’s political discourse. 

 

What does the future hold for the series?  What can we expect to see in future episodes?

 

The series is organized like a book, in parts and chapters, but in another sense, it’s really a collection of short films.

 

Season One, Part One will begin with a “Prologue,” an overview of some of—but nowhere near all—the themes and revelations ahead. The Prologue will premiere on November 22nd to mark the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s murder.  

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After that will come Chapter One, which sets up the “world as it was,” describing the climate of fear that preceded the election of John Kennedy. Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, red-baiting, the rise of the military-industrial complex, and the ever-present fear of nuclear annihilation. This is the atmosphere John Kennedy faced as he became president.

 

Chapter Two will touch briefly on the 1960 campaign (the way Lyndon Johnson left his powerful position in the Senate to force his way onto the Kennedy ticket) and look at the early Kennedy presidency—the plans and promise of the New Frontier, the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, the deeply felt anti-colonial convictions of the new Irish-American president, and the other populist policies enacted and proposed, taking a side trip to study the rise, after World War II, of the Central Intelligence Agency as America’s neo-colonial enforcement arm.  

 

The remaining chapters in Part One will present, in what many have already said is a startling new light, the amazing drama of Kennedy’s battles with the National Security State, Big Business, and the Mafia; his misremembered commitment to Civil Rights, which included sending a recalcitrant National Guard to Mississippi; his refusal to invade Cuba twice, (including the moment only he and his brother stood between the generals and the nuclear button); Kennedy’s refusal to invade Laos and his dogged resistance to sending ground troops to Vietnam; his directive to begin withdrawal from that country, win or lose; his back-channel negotiations with Soviet Premier Khrushchev to end the Cold War. Through it all, the growing ire of the Defense establishment is palpable.  Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired CIA director Allen Dulles and both his lieutenants, including General Charles Cabell, brother of the mayor of Dallas, and threatened to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s investigation of defense contract kickback schemes involving Lyndon Johnson threatened the defense establishment’s key contact in government.  

 

Part One ends with the death of the President in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, just as the United States Senate was conducting hearings into Lyndon Johnson’s graft in the Bobby Baker and TFX fighter scandal.  

 

Part Two focuses on Malcolm X, who, after leaving the Nation of Islam, enlisted the leaders of newly independent states in Africa and elsewhere to bring human rights charges against the United States. If the U.S. were condemned on the floor of the UN as a human rights violator in the same league as South Africa, "it would have been a tremendous blow" to U.S. prestige during the Cold War, as Malcolm's colleague Peter Bailey puts it in his interview.

 

In addition, Malcolm and Dr. King were in talks to join forces, a prospect described by Clarence Jones, an adviser to both men, as the FBI's "worst nightmare." On the verge of attending an international conference in Asia to realize his plans, Malcolm X was murdered in front of his wife and small children.  

 

Part Three looks at the last years of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who broke with his advisers to oppose U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He was taking Bobby Kennedy up on his idea of organizing a multi-racial "Poor People's Campaign" to occupy Washington when he was shot, a year to the day after his devastating speech in Harlem's Riverside Church condemning the Vietnam War. 

 

Part Four tells the story of the man many regarded as America’s last hope. Senator Robert Kennedy reluctantly entered the race for president in 1968 against a sitting president of his party, the man he had feuded with for years…the man who had taken his brother's place as President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

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Compelled by disaster in Vietnam and the dissolution of the U.S. since his brother's death and encouraged by the challenge mounted by Senator Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy entered the race on the promise of ending the war and reunifying the country. But known only to his closest colleagues and confidants was another compelling reason to take the presidency: to bring his brother's killers to justice. The night of his electrifying win in the California primary, Robert Kennedy was murdered.

 

In addition to examining what the four men were doing before they died, each includes sections on the escalation of war and covert action both at home and abroad that followed in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy.  

 

Season Two delves into the citizen investigations and official coverups that began upon the deaths of each man, as well as examining the capture of the press by intelligence agencies and the massive psychological operations they conducted against ordinary citizens, like COINTELPRO and CHAOS.  

 

What do you hope to accomplish with the release of this series as far as the American media and public are concerned?  

 

The public has long had a sense of the truth of these horrific crimes against democracy. A majority has always felt there was much more to President Kennedy’s murder than a “lone nut” without an apparent motive. The captured mainstream media, however, pretends that there’s “nothing to see here” and that the skeptics are unhinged “conspiracy theorists.” While there are good people within the media who want to tell the truth, the reality is that for sixty long years, doing so was discouraged, if not forbidden, by editors and publishers.  

 

We hope that the plain truths presented in this series will be impossible to deny, that they will fortify the public in what they already know in their hearts and give them the courage to demand accountability. 

 

Not only in these, the most consequential murders in living memory, but in a myriad of other crimes against democracy, past, present, and future.

 

We are convinced that confronting these horrors is the only way for America to save itself.