SIGNATORIES
Gary L. Aguilar, MD, is a private practicing ophthalmologist in San Francisco, a clinical professor of ophthalmology at the University of California-San Francisco, and the vice chief of staff at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital. One of the few physicians outside the federal government who has ever been allowed to review President Kennedy’s still-restricted autopsy photographs and X-rays, Aguilar has delivered lectures on JFK’s autopsy evidence before numerous medical and legal conferences. With coauthor Cyril Wecht, MD, JD, Aguilar has published articles on the Kennedy case in journals such as The American Scholar and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and has contributed chapters to several anthologies exploring the JFK assassination. Dr. Aguilar’s writings on various aspects of the Kennedy case are available online, most notably a multipart essay that examines the five investigations of Kennedy’s medical and autopsy evidence that have been conducted by the U.S. government.
Daniel Alcorn was a law partner of the late Bud Fensterwald, co-founder of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC). He has served on the AARC board since 1992, and was a founding director of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) on behalf of AARC, and served on COPA’s board until the end of the Assassination Records Review Board process in 1998. Alcorn has represented requesters in precedent-setting Freedom of Information Act cases in the trial and appellate courts in Washington, D.C., including cases related to the JFK assassination, the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, allegations of misconduct in the FBI crime laboratory, death squad activity in Central America, intelligence abuses, and PTSD, among other issues.
Russ Baker is the founder, editor-in-chief and CEO of WhoWhatWhy, a nonprofit news organization devoted to covering stories and angles ignored by the media. WhoWhatWhy has a special team poring over thousands of declassified JFK records. Baker is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and The Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. It includes five chapters of new information related to the assassination of John Kennedy.
David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novels have received “notable book” mentions by the New York Times, and stellar reviews in the Washington Post and other national publications. A Black-written and produced Law & Order show was selected by TV Guide as one of the 100 best episodes in the history of television and he’s received other awards for episodes of “Law & Order” and “Hill Street Blues. Black received the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best fact crime book and was one of six writers profiled In Rolling Stone’s 50th Anniversary history. Black received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his Rolling Stone article, The Plague Years. As an investigative reporter, David Black has been put under house arrest by Baby Doc in Haiti, infiltrated totalitarian therapy cults and exposed a white slave organization in the East Village. Black has published 11 books and over 150 articles and has taught writing at Mt. Holyoke, NYU, Columbia, Yale and Harvard, where he is a scholar-in-residence at Kirkland House. He is a member of the Century Association, PEN, the Writers’ Guild, the Explorers’ Club, and the Players.
G. Robert Blakey is retired as the William J. & Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Law (now emeritus) at the Notre Dame Law School, where he taught criminal law, the law of terrorism, and jurisprudence. He also was a professor of law and the director of the Cornell Institute on Organized Crime, where he taught criminal law in the law school. Blakey also served as a special attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the United States Department of Justice. From 1977 to 1979, he was the chief counsel and staff director, United States House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Denise Faura Bohdan is a lawyer, film producer and the daughter of Fernando Faura, author of The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing: The Paris Peace Talks Connection, chronicling the search for an alleged conspirator in the assassination of RFK. Faura’s investigation in 1968 is regarded by most researchers as one of the most important, linking Sirhan Sirhan to co-conspirators. Ms. Bohdan is producing a film on his investigation to shine more light on the assassination and conspiracy. Her previous film work focuses on human rights abuses, freedom of speech and pursuit of justice.
Abraham Bolden was the first African-American assigned to the White House Secret Service Detail, at President Kennedy’s personal request. When he later tried to testify to the Warren Commission about rampant misconduct in the Secret Service, he was punished for his courage by a trumped-up bribery charge that resulted in his imprisonment for over three years. He authored a powerful, well-received memoir, The Echo From Dealey Plaza (2008).
Peter G. Bourne, M.D., M.A. is a senior research fellow at Green-Templeton College, University of Oxford; Vice Chancellor Emeritus of St. George’s University in Grenada, West Indies; and Chairman of the Board of Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC). Dr Bourne’s career has spanned being a clinician and researcher, senior government official, international civil servant, diplomat, and author. Dr. Bourne was an assistant professor of psychiatry, preventive medicine and community health at Emory. As Special Assistant to the President for Health Issues in the Carter White House, he led the fight to get the administration’s national health insurance plan through the U.S. Congress. He also was the Director of the Office of Drug Abuse Policy (ODAP), or “drug czar,” where he coordinated law enforcement, treatment and foreign policy aspects of American drug policy. He also established for President Carter national commissions on world hunger and mental illness and served as official emissary in negotiations with heads of state and represented the U.S. on the governing bodies of UN organizations including UNDP, WHO, UNICEF, and the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs.
As an Assistant Secretary General at the United Nations, Dr. Bourne established and ran the “International Drinking Water and Sanitation Decade,” which provided clean drinking water to 500 million people worldwide. He launched the global campaign to eradicate the disease caused by guinea worm. After leaving the UN, he established Global Water, a non-profit charity aimed at providing clean water through local projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Dr Bourne has written extensively on the subject of water and sanitation including editing the book Water and Sanitation: Social and Economic Aspects. Dr. Bourne is the author of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters plus nine books, including two biographies: Fidel (1986) and Jimmy Carter: A Biography from Plains to the Postpresidency (1995).
Rex Bradford pioneered the digital dissemination of declassified JFK assassination documents, creating the History Matters website and publishing document collections on CD-ROM with the Assassination Archives and Research Center. He then went on to build the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, where he is now President. More than 1.5 million pages of declassified documents on the assassinations of the 1960s are available for reading and searching there, including all of the records recently released in 2017 and 2018.
Douglas Caddy is a Houston-based attorney and the author of six books, most recently his memoir Being There: Eyewitness To History. In 1959, he published an article in the National Review that began a long friendship with founding publisher William F. Buckley as they worked together to help found what’s now known as the modern conservative movement. In 1960, Caddy was elected as the founding national director of Young Americans For Freedom. His conservative activism made him an early campaigner for 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Caddy then worked in Washington, DC, as an attorney involved in many high-profile cases. In one, he became the original defense attorney for the Watergate burglars. His legal work has included cutting-edge research and whistle-blowing on the JFK assassination, Koreagate, CIA influences and other justice-related issues.
Rodnell Collins, Malcolm X’s first cousin, is the founder of the Malcolm X, Ella L. Little Collins Family Foundation and curator of the childhood home that he and Malcolm shared in Duxbury, Massachusetts, now a national historic landmark. Collins is working on turning it into a museum. Collins’s memoir, Seventh Child, tells Malcolm’s story from a family member’s point of view. Most recently Collins participated in the 50th anniversary commemoration of the famous Oxford Union debate, “The Night Malcolm Spoke Out.”
Debra Conway is co-founder and president of JFK Lancer Productions & Publications. Since 1995 it has presented U.S. government documents and experts relating to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, Jr. to make research materials widely available. She has interviewed many JFK assassination witnesses, often those speaking about their experiences for the first time. Lancer’s annual conferences in Dallas have hosted such witnesses and also respected authors and researchers from around the world. She has been editor and publisher for many assassination-related books, including those by researchers Larry Hancock, William Matson Law, Casey J. Quinlan, Brian K. Edwards and Joan Mellen and the witnesses Ed Hoffman, Aubrey Rike, and Rose Cherami’s son Michael Marcades. Details here.
Andrea Cousins - It took me forty years to admit what I really wanted to do when I grew up, which was to be a psychotherapist. I was slowed down by coming of age in the sixties and being Norman Cousins' daughter. Psychotherapy looked reactionary to my comrades in the civil rights and anti-war movement; and the unconscious did not go well with world peace, my father’s great mission in life. (No voice like his: "I am a cell in the body of a million cells. The body is mankind."). But with the women’s movement — “the personal is political” — I could believe that relationships with individual people was important. Unexpectedly, over the past fifteen years, the political has become personal again: a number of colleagues and I have been working on legislation to prohibit the participation of healthcare professionals in the torture and abuse of prisoners.
David Crosby is the famed musician and songwriter. He has been speaking out about the JFK assassination since the 1960s, including onstage with the Byrds at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He co-authored his memoir Since Then with Carl Gottlieb.
Edward Curtin is a sociologist who teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams. He is a widely published essayist who has written extensively about the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Don T. Curtis, M.D., is a retired oral and maxillofacial surgeon who participated in the resuscitation attempt of President Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas on the day of the shooting, Nov. 22, 1963.
Alan Dale is the executive director of the Assassination Archives and Research Center. He is the host of JFKConversations.com. He is affiliated with the research groups JFK Lancer and CAPA, and is responsible for administration and content at History in the Making. He is an administrative and research assistant to Dr. John Newman and is the editor of JFK Essentials.com.
James Di Eugenio is a retired educator and historian. From 1995-2000, he was the editor of Probe Magazine. He has written for Consortium News and Deep Truth Journal. He is the co-editor of the anthology, The Assassinations, and the author of Destiny Betrayed and The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. Currently, he is the editor and publisher of the web site KennedysandKing.com.
James W. Douglass is the author of the widely praised JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (2009). He is a longtime peace activist and writer. He and his wife Shelley are co-founders of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington and Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Birmingham, Alabama.
Laurie Dusek, working with Dr. William F. Pepper, has served as legal counsel to Sirhan Sirhan in a pro bono capacity for the past 11 years. She worked extensively with key witnesses and experts investigating Sirhan’s role in the events leading to the assassination of Senator Kennedy. She assisted Dr. Daniel Brown of Harvard Medical School, who spent over 70 hours with Sirhan in prison to recover Sirhan’s memory of the shooting. In December 2017, she accompanied RFK, Jr for a first-time meeting with Sirhan, which led Kennedy to publicly conclude that Sirhan did not kill his father. To-date, she continues to advocate for Sirhan’s parole and is a strong supporter of prison reform.
Daniel Ellsberg, Ph.D., was a national security consultant to the Kennedy White House. Later he leaked the Pentagon Papers. A senior fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, he is the author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner and a memoir, Secrets, which became the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America. He is also a key figure in Steven Spielberg’s film about the Pentagon Papers, The Post.
Karl Evanzz is the author of six books, including two highly acclaimed studies of the Nation of Islam: The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (1992) and The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (1999). A literary and film consultant, Evanzz worked on Malcolm X: Make It Plain (Blackside Productions, 1994) and Ali (2001), starring Will Smith. Evanzz worked at the Washington Post for 32 years in its news department before retiring in 2008.
Richard Falk, Ph.D., is a professor of international law, emeritus, at Princeton University who has taught more recently at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include Power Shift: On the New Global Order (2016). Also, he has published Law, War, and Morality in the Contemporary World; The Role of Domestic Courts in the International Legal Order; Legal Order in a Violent World; The Status of Law in International Society, among other works. He has been the editor or co-editor of more than twenty books.
Isaac Newton Farris, Jr. is the nephew of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He has served as the president and CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center and in 2011 was elected president and CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization founded by Dr. King. Farris currently serves as senior fellow of the King Center where he not only continues to write, research and lecture on the life, philosophy, and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., but also on how Kingian nonviolence should guide American society as we confront the social, religious, economic and war issues of America and of the world today.
Marie Fonzi, Ed.D., is the widow of Gaeton Fonzi, a top investigator on both the Senate and House Committees that probed the death of President Kennedy in the 1970s. Marie wrote the preface and afterword of the 2016 paperback edition of The Last Investigation, Fonzi’s inside story of this fateful Congressional drama.
Libby Handros is an award-winning TV producer and documentary filmmaker. Since beginning her career on the PBS team that produced Inside Story, the first regularly scheduled examination of the American press ever to appear on television, she has gone on to develop and produce over one hundred hours of prime-time programming on a wide array of subjects. Along with director John Kirby, Handros produced the critically acclaimed documentary feature The American Ruling Class and Cape Spin: An American Power Struggle, among other films. Currently she is Kirby’s producing partner on Four Died Trying, a multi-part series on the political murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, which changed the course of history.
Dan Hardway, a graduate of Cornell Law School, has practiced law for the past 37 years. His firm, based in Cowen, West Virginia, focuses on representing nonprofit organizations, especially Christian churches and ministries, and Freedom of Information Act litigants. From 1977 to 1978, Hardway worked as a researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and assisted Ed Lopez in writing the section of the committee report titled, “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City.” His occasional blogs can be found on the site HillbillyNews.com.
David Harris attended Stanford University. He left for a month to join the civil right movement’s Mississippi Project, conducting voter registration with SNCC. Harris first marched against the Vietnam War in 1964. He was elected Stanford Student Body President in 1966 on a platform calling for student control of student regulations and equal rights for male and female students. Upon leaving Stanford, Harris became an anti-war and draft resistance organizer. He refused induction and was indicted and convicted on felony charges. In 1968, Harris married folk singer Joan Baez. He remained active in the anti-war movement until the peace agreements were signed in 1973. Harris began his journalism career at Rolling Stone Magazine as contributing editor. He became involved in political organizing and ran for Congress in Silicon Valley in 1976 as a Democrat. Beginning in 1978, he wrote for almost a decade at The New York Times Magazine after which he has written 10 books on an array of topics including his organizing and political action career and government.
Walter Herbst is a retired engineer. He has spent forty years investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy and related topics, such as America's role in assassinations and government overthrows around the world, the hidden history of the military industrial complex and the civil rights movement. He is the author of It Did Not Start With JFK: The Decades of Events That Led Directly to the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Volumes One and Two.
Matt Herron has had a long career as a photojournalist. He shot photographs for Life and Look magazines during the first sit-ins in Tennessee and North Carolina. With his family, he moved to Jackson, Mississippi where he pursued photojournalism for major magazines, documentary photography as practiced by his mentor, Dorothea Lange, and photography as propaganda for SNCC. Later, in New Orleans, Herron assisted D.A. Jim Garrison’s investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. Herron had flown to Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 and photographed Lee Oswald being paraded in front of journalists at the Dallas jail. He stated that he looked at Dallas police reports with “Mississippi eyes” and was among the early skeptics of the Oswald-as-lone-assassin theory. He also went to Memphis on the day of the MLK assassination and photographed the crime scene, collaborating briefly with Reverend James Lawson in gathering evidence to demonstrate what he felt was a likely government-connected conspiracy.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation (fff.org), a libertarian nonprofit educational foundation, and the author or editor of several books published by the foundation, including The Kennedy Autopsy; Regime Change: The JFK Assassination; The CIA, Terrorism, and The Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State. His 29-part video series on the JFK assassination is posted on the foundation’s website.
Douglas Horne served for three years on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), from 1995-1998. He was hired by the ARRB as a senior analyst on the Military Records Team, and was later promoted to the position of chief analyst for Military Records; while on the ARRB staff, he ensured the release of historical records on Cuba and Vietnam policy; played a key role in the sworn depositions of ten JFK autopsy witnesses; and became the primary ARRB point-of-contact for all matters related to the Zapruder film. He is the author of the five-volume work Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (2009), and the e-book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated (2014).
Bob Katz was a founder and director of the Assassination Information Bureau, the watchdog group that monitored the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation after vigorously lobbying for its creation. He is the author of several novels and works of non-fiction.
Mary Elizabeth King is Director of the James Lawson Institute, professor of peace and conflict studies at the UN-affiliated University for Peace in Costa Rica, and Distinguished Rothermere American Institute Fellow at the University of Oxford, Britain. A political scientist, she is the author of acclaimed books on civil resistance, including Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and most recently Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India. Her academic specialty of nonviolent action dates to her work in the early 1960s for the U.S. civil rights movement in Atlanta and Mississippi, as a staff member of SNCC where she worked closely with Ella Baker and Julian Bond and learned the basics of nonviolent action from the Reverend James M. Lawson. As a result of that experience, she co-authored “Sex and Caste” in 1966, considered a catalyst for the women’s liberation movement. As a presidential appointee for four years in the Carter Administration, King had worldwide oversight for the Peace Corps (then in 60 countries) and Volunteers in Service to America (Vista). She serves on the board of the Albert Einstein Institution, Boston.
Gayle Nix Jackson is the granddaughter of Orville Nix, the man who took the film of the JFK assassination opposite from Abraham Zapruder. Following three decades of research on the background of the government’s loss of this film, she has written two books, Orville Nix: The Missing JFK Assassination Film and Pieces of the Puzzle: An Anthology.
Stephen Jaffe was an investigator and photo analyst for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison from 1967 to 1968. He testified before the Rockefeller Commission, was an associate producer/technical advisor for the film Executive Action, associate producer/technical adviser for documentaries The Garrison Tapes and the sequel by filmmaker John Barbour, and is the producer of the new documentary, A Rush to Judgment: Conspiracy in America, with Mark Lane. Jaffe was an investigator for the Lane Law Firm for the past 50 years and has written numerous articles on the assassination of President Kennedy.
James C. Jenkins was a medical corpsman assigned to work with pathologists on the autopsy of President Kennedy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. One of the only living participants in the autopsy provides his eyewitness account in his book At the Cold Shoulder of History, co-written with William Matson Law (Trine Day Publishing, 2018).
Bill Kelly is a co-founder of the Committee for an Open Archives and the Coalition on Political Assassinations. He was the recipient of the 2013 Mary Ferrell Award for his work on the Air Force One radio transmission tapes. He is currently the coordinator of the research committee for Citizens Against Political Assassinations. His blog is JFK Countercoup.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney and longtime law professor, is the author of American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family. He is the oldest son of Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy. One of the nation’s leading environmental activists, he is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance. He is a law firm partner specializing in environmental litigation and is a multiple New York Times best-selling author who has published hundreds of articles on politics, science, history and the environment.
John Kirby made his directorial debut with the Tribeca Festival-award-winning film The American Ruling Class, made for the BBC and the Sundance Channel. He is currently directing and editing Four Died Trying, a multi-part documentary series on the extraordinary lives and calamitous deaths of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
William Klaber was the producer of The RFK Tapes, a 1993 public radio documentary on the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy. In 1997 he co-authored, with Philip Melanson, the book Shadow Play, which examined the evidence of police misconduct in the RFK murder investigation, evidence found in the LAPD’s own files that was finally made public in 1988.
Andrew Kreig is a Washington, DC-based non-profit executive, attorney, author and commentator who edits the non-partisan Justice Integrity Project, which examines the performance of legal institutions. Its publishing includes separate Readers Guides to the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations that each show leading books, films, archives representing all major points of view, plus events and news developments. He holds law degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago and has written the books Spiked and Presidential Puppetry revealing systemic scandals, cover-ups, and adverse trends in the newspaper business and U.S. political system.
The Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr. was a long-time collaborator with Martin Luther King Jr. and, after the Reverend King, the major teacher in the non-violent struggles for desegregation and justice. Dr. King called Lawson “the greatest teacher of nonviolence in America.” After meeting King in 1957 at Oberlin College, Lawson heeded King’s advice to go to the South in order to share nonviolent methods with the Civil Rights Movement. Lawson became a field officer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and moved to Nashville in 1958; that fall, he enrolled in the divinity school at Vanderbilt University. Rep. John Lewis called him “the architect of the non-violent movement.” He was involved with the struggle to desegregate downtown Nashville, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Freedom Rides and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1968, he supported the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, and invited Martin Luther King Jr. to give a speech in Memphis; on this visit, King was assassinated. Throughout his life, Lawson has remained committed to nonviolence, protest and civil disobedience to effect positive social change.
Jim Lesar is president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to disclose information on political assassinations to the public. During the past 49 years, Lesar has litigated more than 200 Freedom of Information Act cases, resulting in the release of several hundred thousand pages of documents prior to the enactment of the JFK Records Act. He then testified before several House and Senate committees in favor of greatly expanded release of withheld government records pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy. After the passage of the JFK Act, Lesar testified several times before the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) regarding the definition and scope of the term “JFK-assassinated-related” records. In 2006, in a suit in which he represented journalist and author Jefferson Morley, he won a significant precedent that subjected the CIA’s ultra-secret operational files to judicial review. This ultimately resulted in the disclosure of significant operational records, and in the process the CIA admitted under oath that it had hired a case officer linked to Lee Harvey Oswald’s pre-assassination activities to undermine the investigation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Edwin Lopez is an attorney practicing in New York. He has served as the general counsel at the Rochester City School District and is currently on the faculty of the Yang Tan Employment and Disability Institute at the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell University. In 1977 and 1978 he was a researcher for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), where he was involved, among other areas, in the research and investigation of anti-Castro Cuban groups, their possible involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy, possible Cuban government complicity in the assassination of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in Mexico City and the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in monitoring and reporting those activities. With the assistance of other staff members, he wrote the HSCA’s “Lopez Report.”
Dr. David Mantik received his M.D. from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in physics at Stanford University. He is a former faculty member of the physics department at the University of Michigan and of the radiation oncology department at Loma Linda University, where he used protons in the treatment of cancer. He has reviewed the JFK autopsy materials at the National Archives on nine separate occasions, published two peer-reviewed articles on his JFK research, written many online essays, contributed JFK essays to six books, and has lectured at countless conferences. His many measurements on the extant JFK X-rays have documented their alteration at critical points. He is the author of JFK’s Head Wounds(an e-book) in which he demonstrates that the Harper bone fragment derived from JFK’s occipital bone (at the cranium base). That conclusion implies a frontal head shot — and conspiracy. His web site is The MantikView.
Robert N. McClelland, M.D., is professor emeritus in the Department of Surgery at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, an adjunct professor of law at Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University, and a member of the attending staff at Zale Lipshy University Hospital. Previously, he served for 30 years as the UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Alvin W. Baldwin Chair in Surgery, where he had first come to work as an instructor in surgery in 1962. Two years prior to that, he had begun his career on the senior attending staff at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where his duties would include the attempt to save the life of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. While working on the mortally wounded JFK, Dr. McClelland saw clear evidence that the president had been struck by bullets from the front and rear, indicating more than one shooter was involved. The gruesome injury to the back of JFK’s head was caused by a bullet exiting the skull rather than entering it, the doctor, suggesting that it had been fired from the front of the presidential limousine, instead of from the rear, where Lee Harvey Oswald was allegedly shooting from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.
John Meier was a top aide to Howard Hughes including working to stop nuclear testing in the US, Vice Chairman of VP Humphrey’s National Finance Committee for his Presidential Campaign, served on President Nixon’s Task Force on Resources and Environment, was an advisor to several U.S. Senators, including Robert F. Kennedy, a former diplomat and U.S. Senate candidate. Meier has made many efforts to find and expose the truth behind the RFK assassination including having assisted Larry Teeter on a new trial for Sirhan Sirhan that Teeter was planning in 2005. He released his diary notes related to the RFK assassination in the book Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy That Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes and has been working with investigative reporters to bring more facts out about the RFK and JFK assassinations.
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, and author of several books, including Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform. As editor of Discovering America, a book series published by the University of Texas Press, he commissioned Lance DeHaven-Smith to write Conspiracy Theory in America, and his Forbidden Bookshelf series, published by Open Road Media, has revived dozens of essential books long out of print, and many of them killed at birth, including works by I.F. Stone, Peter Dale Scott, Christopher Simpson, Ralph McGehee and Gerald Colby.
Jefferson Morley is the founder of The Deep State, a news blog that illuminates the influence of secret intelligence agencies. He worked for 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He is the author of Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton and of Our Man in Mexico, a biography of the CIA’s Mexico City station chief Winston Scott.
Major John M. Newman, Ph.D., U.S. Army (retired), is adjunct professor of political science at James Madison University. An Army intelligence officer during a 20-year career, he taught for many years at the University of Maryland. He is the author of JFK and Vietnam, Oswald and the CIA and the multi-part series The Assassination of President Kennedy: Volume I, Where Angels Tread Lightly; Volume II, Countdown to Darkness, and Volume III, Into the Storm.
Len Osanic is host of Black Op Radio and producer of The Collected Works of Col. L. Fletcher Prouty.
Lisa Pease is the author of A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Based on more than two decades of investigative research, Pease’s recently published book has already been hailed as “the magnum opus of RFK assassination research” by acclaimed Kennedy biographer James Douglass.
Dr. William F. Pepper is an American lawyer, English barrister and best-selling author. His legal career has included representation of governments and heads of state, and teaching human rights law at Oxford University. A political activist, Pepper was a 1960s friend and supporter of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The King family asked his help to address their doubts about the guilt of accused assassin James Earl Ray. Pepper’s investigation concluded that Ray was a patsy. Representing both the imprisoned Ray before his 1998 death and the King family pro bono, Pepper then won a Memphis civil jury verdict in 1999 for the family concluding the murder was a conspiracy. Pepper authored three books on the evidence, most recently The Plot to Kill King (2016). In 2007, Pepper began representing pro bono Robert F. Kennedy’s accused assassin Sirhan Sirhan based on similar evidence that Sirhan did not fire any of the shots that struck RFK. Along with other RFK friends, Pepper has advocated for Sirhan to be released on parole and/or granted a first-ever hearing to examine the relevant scientific evidence.
Jerry Policoff has been a JFK assassination researcher since 1966, specializing in the role of the media. Widely published in magazines and book anthologies, Policoff covered the House Select Committee on Assassinations for New Times magazine, breaking many exclusives. He is the former executive director of the Assassination Archives and Research Center.
Rob Reiner is an actor and director best known for his role in the iconic TV show All in the Family and for his films A Few Good Men, When Harry Met Sally, and This Is Spinal Tap. His 2017 political thriller Shock and Awe was the first Hollywood movie to examine the tragic run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Reiner is now developing a docudrama TV series on the Kennedy assassinations.
Abby Rockefeller has participated in the sponsoring and organizing of several conferences concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Dick Russell is the author of thirteen books, including three on the assassination of President Kennedy: The Man Who Knew Too Much,” (1992/2003), “On the Trail of the JFK Assassins (2008), and They Killed Our President!, co-authored with Jesse Ventura (2013, a New York Times best-seller.) He authored Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017), which was edited and introduced by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and with a forward by David Talbot. Also, he is a prominent author of environmental articles, with commentary at DickRussellblog. Russell has been featured in several documentary films and is a recipient of the Citizen’s Chevron Conservation Award (1988).
Mort Sahl is an entertainer and political satirist. He helped write speeches for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and later worked closely with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison to solve the Kennedy assassination even though doing so severely damaged his career. “Crowned as leading the new breed of modern comedians by Time magazine in 1960,” according to his IMDB bio, “Mort Sahl is the first entertainer ever to appear on its cover….When JFK was assassinated in 1963, Sahl regularly targeted the government’s official Warren Commission Report during his routines, resulting in the loss of much of Hollywood’s support, while maintaining audience popularity with college tours and a best-selling book, Heartland.”
Vincent J. Salandria is a Philadelphia attorney who began studying the Kennedy assassination on November 23, 1963. One of the original critics of the ‘lone assassin’ concept, he promptly raised his suspicions to contemporaries that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald would be killed (as he was shortly thereafter) if Oswald were just “a patsy,” as the suspect claimed after his arrest. At a public forum in 1964 soon after announcement of the Warren Commission report blaming Oswald as the killing’s sole culprit, Salandria challenged Commission staffer Arlen Specter about the ballistics analysis Specter had supervised. On Nov. 2, 1964, Salandria published in The Legal Intelligencer, the nation’s oldest extant legal journal, a pioneering critique of the Commission’s claims that bullet trajectories and victim wounds prove blame for Oswald alone. Salandria is the author of False Mystery, a 1999 anthology of his essays incriminating the national security state for the murder of JFK. In 2012, Specter (by then a longtime U.S. Senator representing Pennsylvania and facing death from cancer), sought out Salandria for reconciliation, as reported by Philadelphia Magazine. Earlier, Salandria had shared with congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi his conclusion: “The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: ‘We are in control and no one — not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official — no one can do anything about it.’ It was a message to the people that their Government was powerless.”
Lawrence P. Schnapf is the principal attorney of Schnapf LLC and has been an adjunct professor at the New York Law School for many years. He serves on the board of Citizens Against Political Assassinations. He has more than 30 years of environmental law experience with Fortune 500 companies and international law firms. He has researched President Kennedy’s assassination since the late 1960s and has taken a leadership role in organizing a major mock trial in 2017 for accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
E. Martin Schotz, M.D., a longtime practicing psychiatrist in Boston, authored History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial and the Murder of President Kennedy (1996). Two years later, he amplified the book’s findings in a Dallas speech dissecting what he called the JFK assassination cover-up and why “people don’t want to know the truth.” He lives Western Massachusetts, where he works with Pioneer Valley Physicians for Social Responsibility. He sees his essay on the need for an international movement to ban nuclear weapons as “continuing the struggle for which President Kennedy gave his life.”
Paul Schrade is a former United Auto Workers official who knew both of the Kennedy brothers and worked in their campaigns. The labor chairman for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, Schrade is shown at left with the senator on a visit with California farm workers. Shrade was wounded in the hail of gunfire that mortally wounded the candidate. Schrade, who has spent decades researching the RFK assassination, believes that Sirhan Sirhan did not fire the shots that struck Kennedy, although he did shoot Schrade. Schrade is working for Sirhan’s release from prison, saying: “New forensic evidence discovered in 2005 in the FBI’s files by CNN along with other evidence from the Los Angeles Grand Jury and Trial Jury files provides conclusive evidence that a second gunman fatally wounded Robert Kennedy….This evidence has been submitted to all appropriate authorities. They have failed to act for 45 years in their duty to provide justice to Robert Kennedy, his family and the American people.” Schrade’s longtime board memberships include the Dolores Huerta Foundation, the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, and the Watts Labor Community Action Committee.
Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D., a former Canadian diplomat and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, is a leading political analyst and poet. His books include Deep Politics and the Death of JFK; Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics; The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War; The American Deep State; and Poetry and Terror. His website can be found at PeterDaleScott.net.
Martin Sheen is an actor and activist who has starred in many films and television shows. A multiple Emmy- and Golden Globe-winner, his starring roles include President John F. Kennedy in the 1983 NBC-TV mini-series Kennedy and as President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlet in NBC-TV’s The West Wing series from 1999 to 2006. Also in 2006, he joined an all-star ensemble cast for the highly acclaimed feature Bobby, written and directed by his son, Emilio Estevez. Bobby was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and a SAG Award; and starred Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Sharon Stone, William H. Macy, Elijah Wood, Demi Moore and Heather Graham. It is the story of the assassination of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot in the early morning hours of June 5, 1968 in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, and twenty-two people in the hotel whose lives were never the same.
John Simkin established the Spartacus Educational website in 1999, an important section of which was devoted to the Kennedy assassination. He is the author of the e-book Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia.
Bill Simpich a civil rights attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. The main areas of his law practice are government misconduct, housing and toxic tort violations. A contributor to Reader Supported News, he is the author of e-book State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald. He is on the board of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and is analyzing CIA cryptonyms at the foundation’s website. Also, he is reviewing the forensic evidence indicating that Oswald did not use a weapon on Nov. 22, 1963.
Oliver Stone is an Academy Award–winning director and screenwriter best known for his movies Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street and JFK. His 1991 feature JFK provoked a nationwide uproar about the Kennedy assassination that led to Congressional passage of the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act and the release of thousands of important previously withheld government documents. He co-authored with Dr. Peter Kuznick of American University the book and film series The Hidden History of the United States.
Dan Storper is the Founder/CEO of the music, book and travel company, Putumayo. Dan’s father was active in Democratic politics in the 1950s and 1960s. A Latin American Studies major, he became interested in the political struggles of the 1960s after moving to New Orleans and hearing a story about a friend’s mother’s involvement in secret political activities of the time. Dan is currently writing a book about JFK and others who struggled to achieve peace and justice in the face of Cold War tensions.
David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. He is the founder and original editor-in-chief of Salon and a former senior editor of Mother Jones magazine.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the eldest of Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy’s children. She is the former lieutenant governor of Maryland. She has taught foreign policy at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland and is currently a research professor at Georgetown University, where she founded the Center for Retirement Initiatives.
Adam Walinsky served in the United States Department of Justice in 1963-64. He joined Robert Kennedy’s campaign for U.S. Senate in 1964, and then served as counsel and speechwriter for the senator through the presidential campaign of 1968. He was one of the coordinators of the Vietnam Moratorium of 1969-70, and was the Democratic nominee for Attorney General of New York in 1970. He practiced law in New York City until 1994, serving as chairman of the New York State Investigations Commission in 1979-81. Walinsky created and led the Police Corps, a federal program that offered scholarships to college students who agreed in return to train intensively for six months, and then serve four years in a state or local police force. Police Corps programs were created in 30 states, and although funding ended in 2004, many of its graduates are still serving in law enforcement and other civic endeavors across the country. From 2008 to 2012, he led a complete retraining of the Police Department in Baltimore, Maryland. He served in the United States Marine Corps Reserve.
Ben Wecht is the administrator of Duquesne University’s Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law, an internationally acclaimed center for professional and general education that presents academic conferences and seminars on critical societal topics, including the the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He also serves as managing member of the Forensic Sciences and Law Education Group, a business dedicated to disseminating educational video products and online resources relating to topics at the interface of forensic investigation and historical inquiry. Ben is also a freelance writer and editor.
Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., is past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American College of Legal Medicine. He is a clinical professor of pathology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and adjunct professor of law at Duquesne University. Dr. Wecht served as a consultant or expert witness on several major JFK inquests, including New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, the Rockefeller Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He is the author or co-author of 45 professional books and 620 articles dealing with legal medicine and forensic science and eight books for general distribution regarding famous or controversial cases with which he has been professionally involved (such as JFK, RFK, MLK, Elvis Presley, etc.). He has also been an editorial board member of more than 20 national and international medical-legal and forensic scientific publications. He has performed more than 20,000 autopsies and has supervised, reviewed or been consulted on approximately 30,000 additional post-mortem examinations.
Betty Windsor was a close friend of Dallas Times-Herald journalist Jim Koethe, who was murdered in his home in 1964 while working to solve the JFK case. Since the reporter’s murder, she has worked to solve both the Koethe case and the JFK case. Many researchers consider her the most important source on the events in Dallas during that era.