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Celebrity Hometowns with Josh Mankiewicz

October 27, 2021 /

This episode of My Favorite Murder features Josh Mankiewicz from Dateline discussing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, true crime, and his career in journalism.

Josh shares his experiences working on Dateline, reflecting on the evolution of true crime storytelling since he joined the show in 1995. He notes how the genre has gained popularity and how he initially resisted covering true crime stories.

The conversation shifts to the Kennedy assassination, with Josh recounting his personal connection to the event as he was living in Peru at the time. He describes the slow dissemination of news and how it impacted his family.

Josh discusses various conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination, including the criticisms of the Warren Commission's findings. He expresses skepticism about the official narrative and shares insights from his career covering political and criminal stories.

Throughout the episode, Josh emphasizes the importance of giving a voice to victims' families and reflects on how the Kennedy assassination continues to resonate in American culture.

TLDR

Josh Mankiewicz discusses the JFK assassination and his true crime career on Dateline.

Episode

32:27
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Hello! And welcome to My Favorite Murder, Celebrity Hometown Version. That's right.
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We asked our friends that are famous and celebrities to talk to us and give us their hometown as a special year-end treat for all our murderino friends out there.
00:01:57
We know that regular hometowns are fun, but how about we mix in a little high-level fame?
00:02:03
Yeah, that's what George and I were thinking. That's what everyone wants. And today, we have a very, very familiar voice to everyone out there that we get really excited when we hear, too.
00:02:14
It's our friend from Dateline, Josh Mankiewicz. Woo-hoo! Let's hear that voice. Stay sexy, don't get murdered.
00:02:23
Yes, right off the bat. I love it. Josh, Dateline has been on for 30 years this year.
00:02:33
Yeah, yeah. How is that possible? You know, this is our 30th season. You know, I joined in 1995, so I'm, you know, kind of a newcomer.
00:02:47
You're the new kid on the block. Yeah, you know, I've only been here 26 years. So, you know, I mean, look, you know, in TV, you know, nothing lasts 30 seasons.
00:02:57
No, no. You know, Monday Night Football, Meet the Press. I mean, not a lot, 60 Minutes.
00:03:04
So when I joined, I certainly didn't think I was going to be here 30 seasons later, but I am, and it's been great.
00:03:10
You must love what you do. I mean, we love what you do, so hopefully you love what you do.
00:03:15
No, I love it. I definitely do. It's been wonderful. Were you shocked at this, like, kind of true crime wave that has happened recently?
00:03:25
I mean, what's that been like for you guys who have been around the whole time? I was completely blindsided by it.
00:03:32
For the first 10 years that I was at Dateline, from like 1995 to 2005, we weren't doing true crime.
00:03:39
And we were doing all kinds of stories, like five or even six unrelated stories within the hour.
00:03:47
All kinds of things. And that was fun. And then around 2005, 2006, we started making the turn to doing single subject hours, and a lot of them were true crime.
00:04:01
And originally, you know, when they first started talking about it, I wasn't interested in it.
00:04:07
Really? I didn't really want to do that. Yeah, because my feeling was like the police beat is like the thing you do at the beginning of your career, you know?
00:04:16
And I had done that. You know, I covered a lot of cop stories when I was young. But I could also tell that this was sort of the direction that Dateline was going in,
00:04:25
which was that we were going to start doing more of this stuff. And David Corvo, our executive producer, who was kind of behind this move,
00:04:33
you know, I could tell he really, like, this was where we were going. And he thought this was really going to help us.
00:04:39
And he also thought there was an audience out there for it, which he turned out to be completely correct about.
00:04:43
Yeah, yeah. So I did the first one, which was about the disappearance and then subsequent murder of Brianna Denison in Reno.
00:04:53
And, you know, I sort of realized what everybody else who's covered this, you know, eventually realizes.
00:04:59
I mean, the things I liked about that story were the things I liked about every story, which is that, you know, writing is writing, reporting is reporting.
00:05:07
And there's a real important story to be told there. And then I sort of got hooked, you know, just the same way the audience did.
00:05:15
And now I'm really glad that we've been doing it this long. It's been great. Yeah.
00:05:19
You guys give a voice to the families of victims, which I think is so important.
00:05:25
I'm still in touch with her mom. Wow. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. I have seen you interview people who seem to be involved, but are the kind of people who will be interviewed on television to say they're not and then watch you make the face at them sitting in a prison like interview room.
00:05:49
Yeah, I suppose I should try to be a little more opaque when I'm interviewing. No we all feeling it But I not good at it You know it not like I you know not like I doing facial isometrics before the interview You know I going to do this you know
00:06:05
But yeah, I mean, look, my feeling is that, you know, I was a political reporter for a long time before joining Dateline.
00:06:12
And covering politics and covering crime, like there are a lot of things in common, which is that, you know, the person you're interviewing, the murderer who's telling you, you know, this isn't me.
00:06:24
This isn't possible. I couldn't do that. I, you know, I would never do that. And here's why it couldn't have happened. That's not terribly difficult, but different from a candidate for public office explaining to you why you should vote for them and why their opponent is, you know, a lying scoundrel.
00:06:44
They're going to change the world. Right. You know, and so and that doesn't, you know, and you in both cases, you let them roll out their their spiel.
00:06:54
You know, this is what I think. This is why I'm going to make the tax base better.
00:06:59
And this is also why I the fact that I was found covered in blood and didn't have an alibi.
00:07:04
That doesn't mean anything. And, you know, in both cases, you let them say what they want to say.
00:07:09
And in both cases, you have to poke holes in it. And I suppose that when I was covering politics, I also probably had that face.
00:07:18
Nobody talked about it, but I probably was doing the same thing. Man, I bet you've been in a room with a lot of sociopaths.
00:07:27
Yes. Like maybe more than most people ever. Yes, between politics and murder stories.
00:07:34
Good dog, yes. Yeah, they attract some of the same types of people. Do you get like a feeling?
00:07:39
That's what I was going to say. Yeah. Do you get like a feeling when you walk in the room? Is there like a, is there a tell? We all want to know, like, how can we spot it in the wild, you know?
00:07:49
Well, I mean, so many politicians are, you know, liars in one way or another. And particularly when they're accused of something, you know, not just not just running, but they are alleged to have done something, something wrong or something improper.
00:08:05
And yeah, those interviews are not terribly different from the ones we do on Dateline with the with the defendants.
00:08:14
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's true. But, you know, in both cases, I mean, the rules are the same.
00:08:18
Like they get to say what they want to say and we get to we get to poke some holes in that.
00:08:24
And that's that's the fun of both those jobs. Yeah. Is there a number like a small amount of those convicted that you actually believed didn't do it?
00:08:32
Or is it kind of across the board? No, there are there are a couple of people. And because I have covered these stories and I need to I may need to cover them again.
00:08:43
I'm not going to say who it is. But over the years, I'm going to say there are, and when I say handful, I mean literally a handful, like probably less than five defendants who I've thought, I could not have voted to convict this person.
00:09:00
That doesn't happen very often because usually by the time people get into court for that trial, there's some significant evidence against them.
00:09:07
Yeah. But there are a couple of cases, and the thing that connects those defendants, I would say, is that they are unlikable people, and that either they are unlikable or their conduct is particularly unlikable.
00:09:27
And when juries start disliking you because you cheated on your wife or you always spoke to her in an insulting, demeaning manner, that kind of thing sometimes can overwhelm or be just as important as the actual forensic or literal or eyewitness evidence against you.
00:09:48
And so in some cases, the people who were convicted that I thought, I'm not sure, were guys who had done something unlikable.
00:09:56
And the jury, I thought, kind of voted as much on that as they did on the evidence.
00:10:02
But, you know, whichever way it goes, that's the story we do. And, you know, I mean, certainly we're going to mention all of that.
00:10:12
But, you know, I don't get a vote. The jury does. And as we know from all the stories that you guys have done and that we have done, like the jury doesn't always hear everything.
00:10:21
Yeah. My stance from here on out as a politician is that Josh Mankiewicz should be the sole judge and jury for every trial.
00:10:29
You should get a say is what I'm saying. That's an interesting thought. Yeah. It's just you and Keith Morrison up there in that judge's bench.
00:10:38
Just the two of us. Yeah. Just look, we know this stuff. Yes. Yes. Interview me, interview me.
00:10:46
Wow, that's fascinating. Keith would say, I find you guilty or do I? And I'm going to lean on a thing.
00:10:54
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Now we're like kind of in the mood, in the like spooky mood of like crimes and stuff.
00:14:21
Do you want to tell us whatever it is your hometown is? But it could be, it's a really loose term these days.
00:14:27
Yes. So the story first interested you or whatever it is. Well, the story that first got me interested in true crime,
00:14:35
and it carried me for a number of years and in ways which I'll explain, was essentially, well, I don't know.
00:14:44
You might call it a cold case. No one was ever put on trial. The supposed killer died before trial ever began. The person who killed the supposed killer never made it to trial.
00:14:58
And this has remained probably the biggest mystery, the biggest murder mystery of my lifetime. It's the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
00:15:08
I was seven years old. I was, we were living in Peru because my dad, who'd worked for President Kennedy in 1960
00:15:20
and had then been appointed director of the Peace Corps in Peru, the inaugural class there,
00:15:26
we were living in South America. And we were not even home in Lima, Peru at the time.
00:15:32
We were up in the mountains in a town called Arequipa. and that's significant because our keep i believe didn't have the capability or at least where we
00:15:41
were didn't have the capability to make an international phone call so the information
00:15:46
that we were getting that day was coming from a shortwave radio i very distinctly remember people
00:15:51
clustered around like like a ham radio uh they were calling lima trying to get more information
00:15:57
because like you know what you would do now right now is you'd fire up the internet but even back in
00:16:01
the 1960s, you know, you'd call somebody in the United States and say, what's on TV?
00:16:06
And we didn't even have that. So it was, information came out very slowly, but it was the first time I ever saw my dad
00:16:15
cry. I'll never forget that. And of course, it was the beginning of this giant mystery.
00:16:24
The Warren Commission sort of officially investigated it in 1964 and came to the conclusion that
00:16:30
Harvey Oswald had done this and he acted alone. And almost instantly, the official version was
00:16:37
challenged by a number of people who seemed to know what they were talking about. And I remember
00:16:41
reading about that in the newspapers in the mid-60s as the criticisms of the Warren Commission
00:16:48
began and started growing. Now, the interesting thing about this is that a lot of today's
00:16:55
conspiracies. You know, the government is poisoning us with the chemtrails from the planes.
00:17:02
Bill Gates is, you know, charting our movements from the COVID vaccine. You know, the election
00:17:08
was rigged. A lot of that crazy stuff has its roots in the Kennedy assassination. Not in that
00:17:18
story, but in that perception that sort of took hold in the 1960s that the government's not telling
00:17:25
you the truth, that there are secrets out there that are being concealed from you. I'm not a big
00:17:31
conspiracy guy, but, and in fact, I can't think of too many other conspiracy theories that I do
00:17:38
believe, but the official version of the Kennedy assassination sort of never made sense to me,
00:17:45
just the way it never did to a lot of other people. Now, I kept brushing up against this
00:17:51
story in my life Not only did I read a lot about it at the time I remember devouring William Manchester book about President Kennedy life or his presidency called A Thousand Days But when I went to college I went to Haverford College outside of Philadelphia
00:18:07
And one of my professors there was a guy named Josiah Thompson. I obviously didn't know this when I went to college.
00:18:14
He'd written a book. He was one of the original Warren Commission critics. And he'd written a book called Six Seconds in Dallas, which you can still find, which, by the way, is a great book.
00:18:22
and he talked a lot about sort of how the official version of events didn't make sense and why
00:18:30
and I'm not going to bore you with getting into the minutia of this but it's because it's easily
00:18:34
possible to spend three four or five hours talking about the the nuts and bolts of the different
00:18:39
theories or what's wrong with the official explanation but I remember thinking you know
00:18:44
wow once again I'm I'm hearing about this and I'm thinking about this and reading uh reading
00:18:49
Professor Thompson's book and talking with him. And then after I got out of college, I went to
00:18:54
work for ABC News. And one of my early jobs was I was covering Capitol Hill for them behind the
00:19:01
camera as what's called an off-air reporter. And as part of that, I covered the House Select
00:19:07
Committee on Assassinations, which was established in 1976 and which finally issued its report
00:19:13
in 1979 after some lengthy and very well publicized hearings about both the King assassination and the
00:19:20
JFK assassination. And the committee was all set to sort of in some ways ratify the commission,
00:19:27
the Warren Commission, by saying it looked like it was just one guy. When they got this very
00:19:32
persuasive audio testimony, sort of forensic audio analysis by these two guys who came in,
00:19:40
who analyzed a tape that was made of the police radio transmissions at the moment that the shots
00:19:45
were being fired in Dealey Plaza. And they were pretty persuasive. Now, anybody listening to this
00:19:50
who knows about this is also going to know that those findings were called into question later by
00:19:55
other analysts. This has been a long time. This story has, you know, as I say, it could take a
00:20:02
thousand days to tell this story. So I'm aware of the criticism of that. But I will tell you that
00:20:06
When I heard that, it was pretty persuasive. And there were certain things about the official version that never made any sense.
00:20:15
The so-called single bullet theory. The idea that Oswald fired a shot that went through President Kennedy and then went through Governor Connolly.
00:20:23
And broke a rib and shattered his wrist and then lodged in his thigh. And then somehow rolled off of a stretcher in Parkland Hospital a couple hours later.
00:20:34
And it's just about pristine. It's a very good firearms analysis match to the mail-order gun that Mr. Oswald bought to shoot the president with.
00:20:43
So, no, it's a perfect match back to that gun. And it's one reason why it's a big underpinning of the theory that Mr. Oswald did it in the act alone.
00:20:52
It's very hard to replicate a bullet that pristine having gone through two people.
00:20:56
Because frequently in Dateline and lots of other cases, police can't get a firearms analysis match from a bullet that's been fired into a person because it's too mashed up.
00:21:05
So they rely on other ways of doing it. So that always, I thought a lot about that over the years.
00:21:12
And sort of the more I knew about forensic analysis, the more I sort of did that kind of work, it reminded me of that.
00:21:20
And then there's one more thing. After he left the Peace Corps, my dad went to work for Robert Kennedy.
00:21:26
He was Bobby's press secretary from 1966 until the minute he was killed in June of 1968.
00:21:31
and lots of people, as you might imagine, came to Bobby Kennedy with their own theories,
00:21:39
some of which were crazy, some of which were probably not crazy, some of which seemed to
00:21:44
have some validity to them. And they all said, you know, I know what happened and I want to help you
00:21:48
out. And here's what I'm pretty sure I know what happened to your brother. I know who was waiting
00:21:52
for him there in Dallas. And Bobby Kennedy did not want to deal with any of those people.
00:21:57
I bet. And so he appointed someone on his staff to sort of act as the catch-all for all of that information, talk to those people.
00:22:06
And that person was my dad. Wow. And so these assassination theorists, some of whom were nuts and some of whom were not, like came over to our house.
00:22:19
I remember a guy came over to our house once and he had giant grainy blow ups of the area around what's called the grassy knoll in Dallas, which was an area where a lot of people thought they heard gunshots.
00:22:34
And he had these photographs of that area at that time. So big, you could sort of see the pixels in the frame.
00:22:41
And he carried one of these giant photos across the street and set it up on our neighbor's lawn across the street.
00:22:48
And we all stood in the living room. And he's like, so what do you see? He yelled at us across the street.
00:22:56
And what you saw very clearly was a guy with a gun or a tree branch, depending on where you sit.
00:23:06
But, I mean, you know, did he have something there? Yeah, he had something that was certainly plausible.
00:23:11
And there were a lot of these people over the years that came by and had all kinds of interesting different theories.
00:23:19
So when I covered the House Assassinations Committee and they came up with a conclusion at the end of their hearings that the president was killed by more than one shooter and that there was some kind of conspiracy.
00:23:33
They didn't know what it was. They said it wasn't the Soviet government. They said they didn't think it was the Cuban government.
00:23:38
They left open the possibility that it might have been organized crime, but they basically said they weren't sure, except they were confident that the official version wasn't correct.
00:23:48
And then later, of course, it's turned out, now we're going down the road some years, later it's turned out that the CIA and the FBI were not in any way cooperative with either the original investigation by the Warren Commission or by the FBI.
00:24:00
Subsequent investigation by the House Assassinations Committee, as you might expect from the CIA and FBI, they held a lot back.
00:24:06
And what was that? We don't know. Some of those records from the Assassinations Committee haven't been looked at and I think are sealed for like 50 years or something.
00:24:18
But that remains an enduring mystery. And I kept brushing up against it again and again and again, you know, through my dad and then at college and then with my first job covering Capitol Hill.
00:24:29
So, you know, I was already interested in it. And then I ended up sort of learning more and more about it just because it was, you know, it was always right there in front of me.
00:24:38
And so when I started covering true crime all those years ago, that was kind of a good fit with all of that.
00:24:48
Yeah. I mean, that is the ultimate hometown, really, because it was in a lot of ways for people back then, it was everyone's hometown.
00:25:01
You know, this kind of complete reality shift for everyone alive in America. You know, all Americans that basically went through something that was unimaginable like that.
00:25:12
And then to just be in a place where you would be entertaining what the possible truths of it were or like what the facts.
00:25:22
One of the enduring theories of the JFK assassination was that there was a guy with an umbrella who carried an umbrella in Dealey Plaza on a sunny day.
00:25:31
Yeah. And he puts up the umbrella, which was seen to many as, you know, some kind of signal like, here we go, you know, commence firing.
00:25:42
and the assassinations committee I thought did a very good job they found that guy
00:25:46
and all these years later and they brought him in and he talked about what he'd been doing which
00:25:52
had nothing to do with any assassination plot he was uh it was supposed to be a symbol of um
00:26:00
I believe Neville Chamberlain he was accusing Kennedy of appeasement uh in the same way that
00:26:08
that Neville Chamberlain, I think, had been accused of being soft on Nazi Germany and the Axis powers.
00:26:15
And the umbrella was meant to evoke Chamberlain, as I recall. So it turned out that it wasn't anything, but it was a great piece of history
00:26:24
just to have debunked right in front of my eyes there in a house hearing room. They never found the woman in the scarf. Is that right?
00:26:33
There's a woman in a scarf. Oh, like a headscarf like that? Yeah, and the Zapruder films, and they never found her.
00:26:40
Right, right, right. Well, the Zapruder film, like, you know, first of all, today, like, somebody takes a shot at the president.
00:26:49
Like, you're not going to need a haberdasher, which is what Abe Zapruder was, to provide a record of history.
00:26:57
Like, every network's going to be there. And there's going to be all this security footage from all the cameras around.
00:27:03
And everybody in the crowd's going to be on their iPhone. You don't have too much video.
00:27:07
But the idea that like then there's no record of this incredibly important event in American history except a guy who happened to take a home movie.
00:27:18
Yeah, there could have been none if he hadn't just happened to. Could easily have been none.
00:27:22
Yeah. But wait was that the standard back then that like if the president was there you know like kind of that no news stations would have gone down to get it No no no But the idea that like they would have been they would have been recording all the way through the motorcade That didn happen then You know back then sure there were there were press with him There was traveling press with him
00:27:46
but it was the press bus was all the way at the end of the motorcade. And there were crews there,
00:27:51
TV crews, but they would have had film cameras just like Mr. Zapruder had, maybe a little better
00:27:55
than his. And there were crews set up at the trademark where the president was going. So,
00:28:00
I mean, there was a lot of coverage back then of sort of scheduled events, like the president's speech to the trademark that afternoon.
00:28:08
But there wasn't a lot of coverage of, you know, we want to be rolling just in case what might happen.
00:28:15
And, you know, you go, you know, you go forward in history. I mean, look at all the videotape there is of the Reagan attempted assassination.
00:28:24
But before that, there's video of both Sarah Jane Moore and Squeaky Frone taking shots at or trying to take shots at President Ford.
00:28:33
You know, you didn't have to rely on, there's news film of that. You didn't have to rely on citizens taking home movies.
00:28:39
Yeah. So you must have, and maybe it changes all the time, but you must have your own pet theory that you love.
00:28:47
You know, there are, I mean, as to what I really think happened, The official explanation, for reasons which I was talking about earlier, of the single bullet theory, that never made any sense.
00:28:58
And to believe that, you have to believe things just because you want to believe them.
00:29:02
You have to believe that Governor Connolly was shot, but he doesn't show any reaction to it for a little while.
00:29:07
He's shot with the same bullet, but you don't see him react in time. You have to believe there was a delayed reaction.
00:29:12
When people turn and look at the stockade fence, the grassy knoll, you have to believe that Dealey Plaza is an acoustical freak and that they were looking at that because of the echoes, not because they actually heard gunshots coming from right over their shoulder.
00:29:29
So for those reasons alone, I was sort of, you know, kind of discounted the official explanation.
00:29:36
You also have to believe that, you know, Jack Ruby, this like, you know, creep of a guy who, you know, owned a strip club and used his sort of the fact that a lot of cops in Dallas knew him, used that to sort of get into the area where Oswald was being transferred.
00:29:58
that Jack Ruby, this guy who'd never had a moral thought in his entire life, was suddenly so outraged at what happened to President Kennedy
00:30:07
that because he felt bad for Jackie Kennedy, I think is what he said, that he wanted to kill the man who had killed the president.
00:30:13
And he happened to just have terminal cancer. That always seemed like too easy to me in the same way
00:30:19
that that bullet rolling off the stretcher seemed too easy. But what was really going on, I do not pretend to know.
00:30:26
I don't. Is it possible that it was organized crime? Yeah, it's possible. Is it possible that it was anti-Castro Cubans
00:30:34
who thought that Kennedy was moving in the wrong direction? Sure. But could it be neither one of those things?
00:30:40
It could be. But the only thing I've been convinced about over the years is that the official story wasn't the correct story.
00:30:46
Yeah. Do you think that Oswald was a patsy or do you think he actually was involved
00:30:51
but under someone else's command? It strikes me as unlikely that he had no involvement at all, or that he was framed for this.
00:31:00
I mean, he said he was a patsy early on. I'm being set up. I'm a patsy, he said, around the time he was arrested.
00:31:09
Also imagine today letting the guy who been accused of killing the president like you know 24 hours earlier give a press conference even a little brief one in the police station Like I just
00:31:24
don't see that happening. But yeah, I was he involved in some way? Yes, I think he probably
00:31:29
was involved in some way. Exactly what way? I don't know. And his background, his history
00:31:35
is so weird and so murky. And it may well be his, it may well be the reason why the CIA
00:31:43
doesn't want to say anything about, or it wasn't as forthcoming as they should have been
00:31:48
with both the Warren Commission and the House Committee because they'd had some interactions with him previously.
00:31:54
I don't know. But yeah, I think he probably had something to do with it. Yes. Very interesting.
00:31:59
Wow. This could be a thousand days podcast. I mean, it really is fascinating. Or you need to write a book about this.
00:32:08
Yes. Like I would read this immediately. Yeah. Well, all right. I feel like there's probably enough books written about this.
00:32:15
One more. But your take. There's got to be 50 of them, right? Yes. Come on. Well, I want to read the one you mentioned that your professor wrote.
00:32:26
That sounds. Yes. Six Seconds in Dallas. Very good. I bought it on Amazon a couple of years ago because I'd lost my original copy.
00:32:35
But yeah, it's still out there. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Josiah Thompson is the author.
00:32:41
Okay. I mean, great one. Great hometown. That was killer. Great job. Pretty major.
00:32:47
We're not surprised. No. This is very Josh Mankiewicz of you to have that as your hometown.
00:32:53
I know. I know. It really is. Yeah, it is. You know, I thought about which crime I was going to talk about.
00:32:59
I did. And I thought about some crimes, actually, that I covered when I was in local news in Washington, D.C.
00:33:04
and then later when I was Long Island correspondent in New York. But this won out.
00:33:10
The Kennedy assassination won out. You know, the Oliver Stone movie that came out,
00:33:16
which was, you know, not a documentary. I mean, it's a dramatic film. So, you know, let's not take it as historical record.
00:33:22
But the one thing about it that I just loved so much was the tagline, which was the story that won't go away, which is what this is.
00:33:31
It's what it's always been. And for people of a certain age, my age, yeah, it's the story that won't go away.
00:33:38
And it does make sense that because so many people went through trauma like that, it's very easy to convince people the government's against you.
00:33:48
That kind of idea of like. They're all lying to you. And I mean, you know, it wasn't long after that, that, you know, that the right wing in this country began this, you know, now more than 50 year campaign against academics, against truth, against knowledge, against journalists, against teachers, against scientists.
00:34:08
You know, they're all lying to you. Well, the reason that those arguments work is that a lot of people of all political stripes really did think the government was lying to them starting in 1964.
00:34:20
Yeah. Wow. With good reason, yeah. That's a fascinating take. Man, Josh, thank you so much.
00:34:29
Thank you both. Thank you both. Thanks for having me. Oh, my God. Everyone, make sure, of course, to watch Dateline Fridays, 9, 8 Central, and NBC, and check out all of Josh's.
00:34:41
On Twitter, you're at Josh Mankiewicz? At Josh Mankiewicz, yes. He's the best. He my favorite follow on Twitter I know I love it Just some pretty consistent good times but then there also the hard information that I personally need that I like ooh I better I going to
00:34:59
read that article. I mean, I would say, well, thank you. Thank you. Yes, I do both. I do both.
00:35:05
I do both. You do. Hard-hitting and, and although lately it seems like the, the amusing,
00:35:12
the hard-hitting stuff's about as hard to find as a dress with pockets, if you know what I mean.
00:35:16
I think you do. Hey, come on now. Always got to be on the search for that. Yeah, always.
00:35:22
But yeah, no, it's, you know, Twitter's a lot of fun. I didn't want to do Twitter either.
00:35:27
NBC talked me into that. It turned out to be fun. Glad they did. We thank NBC for that.
00:35:32
That's right. And also, every once in a while, you just kind of rib Keith Morrison.
00:35:37
People will write something about to Dateline, please don't ever do this. And then Josh comes in with like, don't worry about it.
00:35:45
We're, you know, Keith will be on the case forever or whatever. So much fun. Yeah.
00:35:50
It's great. It's great. And it brought, we're just, we're just happier in our world because we're very honored that
00:35:56
you hang out with us sometimes. Thank you so much. It's been great. Great, great to see you both.
00:36:01
You too. I still wear my Dateline hat that you gave us at the live show. Proudly, proudly wear it.
00:36:07
Good, good. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for representing. Yeah. Thank you for being here on our Celebrity Hometown Edition.
00:36:16
Josh Mankiewicz. Josh Mankiewicz, everyone. Thanks, guys. Elvis, do you want a cookie?
00:36:20
Ah! show on Instagram and Facebook at My Favorite Murder and Twitter at My Fave Murder. For more
00:36:46
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This episode stands out for the following:

  • 60
    Best overall
  • 60
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  • 60
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Episode Highlights

  • Dr. Death the Cowboy
    A tale of a charming neurosurgeon who left a trail of broken bodies.
    “This is a story of greed, betrayal, and a fight for justice.”
    @ 00m 51s
    October 27, 2021
  • Josh Mankiewicz on True Crime
    Josh discusses the evolution of Dateline and the rise of true crime.
    “I was completely blindsided by it.”
    @ 03m 29s
    October 27, 2021
  • Kennedy Assassination Reflection
    Josh shares his personal connection to the JFK assassination and its mysteries.
    “I'll never forget that.”
    @ 16m 15s
    October 27, 2021
  • The Mystery of the Umbrella Man
    One enduring theory of the JFK assassination involves a mysterious man with an umbrella.
    “He puts up the umbrella, which was seen to many as some kind of signal.”
    @ 25m 22s
    October 27, 2021
  • The Official Story's Flaws
    The speaker critiques the official explanation of the JFK assassination, highlighting its inconsistencies.
    “To believe that, you have to believe things just because you want to believe them.”
    @ 28m 58s
    October 27, 2021
  • Josh Mankiewicz's Take on JFK
    Mankiewicz shares his insights on the JFK assassination and its lasting impact.
    “The story that won't go away.”
    @ 33m 26s
    October 27, 2021

Episode Quotes

  • I love it.
    Celebrity Hometowns with Josh Mankiewicz
  • I was completely blindsided by it.
    Celebrity Hometowns with Josh Mankiewicz
  • It's just you and Keith Morrison up there in that judge's bench.
    Celebrity Hometowns with Josh Mankiewicz
  • You have to believe things just because you want to believe them.
    Celebrity Hometowns with Josh Mankiewicz
  • I think he probably had something to do with it.
    Celebrity Hometowns with Josh Mankiewicz
  • The story that won't go away.
    Celebrity Hometowns with Josh Mankiewicz

Key Moments

  • Greed and Betrayal00:51
  • True Crime Wave03:29
  • JFK Assassination16:15
  • Conspiracy Theories23:11
  • Official Version Disputed23:38
  • Enduring Mystery24:18
  • Cultural Impact25:01
  • Speculation on Oswald31:59

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown