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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. We have an extraordinary guest today, noted investigative reporter Gerald Posner, author of 13 books, columns and much research. It's an honor and privilege to have you here with us today, Gerald, welcome.
Gerald Posner
Rich, thanks so much. It's great to be with you. My wife, Trisha Posner, had a great interview with you on The Common Bridge, so I'm very happy to be here as the second Posner to join you.
Richard Helppie
Yes, you're following in some big footsteps there. I hope I got [correct] the number of the books that you've written. Today you're publishing on Substack and on your own website. Where else can people find Gerald Posner these days?
Gerald Posner
On Forbes. I'm contributing to Forbes occasionally, but they can find me on Twitter @GeraldPosner and on Substack at “Just the Facts with Gerald Posner.”
Richard Helppie
“Just the Facts with Gerald Posner.” Now, Gerald, you've been at this a long time, but for the people that might not know about you, what were your early days like? What was your education, your career arc and what led you to become one of the leading investigative reporters in the United States today?
Gerald Posner
Rich, actually by chance in some ways. I mean, it's interesting in the sense that I didn't grow up thinking I wanted to be a reporter, a journalist. I grew up thinking I wanted to be a lawyer. I grew up in San Francisco in the 50s and 60s, went to a Catholic High School - St. Ignatius College Preparatory - then went on to Berkeley, and then finally went to Hastings Law School. I graduated in '78, had a law degree, I went back to New York to practice because I wanted to see what those big Wall Street law firms were like. I ended up at one and then after a couple of years realized that it wasn't my cup of tea, the big practice of law, so I went into a small practice. That's when I met Trisha actually, in 1980. I had a couple of twins come into my office through a friend. They had been experiment victims at Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi death camp, experimented on by Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death. At the time, we thought he was alive and well, still living in South America. What they wanted was they wanted the German government or the Mengele family to pay for the extra cost they had for medical care every year as a result of the experiments he had done on them when they were children in that Nazi camp. I did it as a pro bono. I figured I'll give my time and that turned into a four year project. We got thrown out of federal court. I eventually turned it into a biography of Mengele - got his diaries - we found out that he was dead. It was my first book and some of the proceeds went back to the twins. I did it with a co-author from England, who was a great investigative journalist, John Ware. At the end of that project I said to Trisha, instead of going back to law...I was told when I was in Paraguay looking for Mengele and Nazis, by these Corsican heroin dealers who are down there in safe haven, they said to me that heroin trade used to be an honorable business but it's been taken over by the Chinese - I never heard of anything like that - by the triads in Hong Kong. I said to Trisha, evidently, the triads now control the heroin business, would you like to do that as a project? And I knew I'd met the right person because she said, yes. We went off to the Golden Triangle for a few months and that became the second book. Since then, as you said, 13 books later, I like to approach things that others stay away from because they think that they're either too difficult or too many documents or too much material or you can't come to an answer. So I had enough hubris to tackle the JFK assassination and concluded, to many people's disappointment, that it was Oswald alone. The King assassination, which I think it's Ray, and maybe his brothers and some racists from St. Louis, who were funding him. I've also looked into the Saudis and 9/11, what happened with the Vatican and 200 years of finances. My last book was a history of the pharmaceutical industry in America. So I like the big projects, and I'm very lucky to get publishers that allow me to come up with an idea, not knowing - and this you will understand and appreciate - not knowing what my conclusion is, because I don't know what it is until I report it. So therefore, what they're doing is they're banking that I'm going to do a good job of reporting, come to some conclusions, but I'm not sure what they are until I finish. I hate this idea that people sell books with an idea of what the book is going to say before they've done their work. You can't do that in this business.
Richard Helppie
Well, I am in strong agreement with this. We've had Matt Taibbi on the show a couple of times and Matt was a darling of the left in some respects. He was an avowed Liberal Democrat, he wrote a book called "Insane Clown President" where he was astonished at the antics of Donald Trump, he was writing for Rolling Stone Magazine and as soon as he started calling out what some of the facts were given the censorship on big tech platforms, all of a sudden he's thrown out of the tent. It's like, wait a minute, he's gone to "the other side." We're seeing so much of that in our reporting. I think this level of distrust is very dangerous. Recently, on The Common Bridge, we had author Steve Drummond talking about Harry Truman and the work that he did leading up to the war economy in World War II and then getting from the war economy back to a civilian economy. People trusted what Harry Truman was doing and now we fast forward not that far into the 1960s with so much controversy around the Kennedy assassination. I personally read half dozen books on it. My cousin actually wrote a historical fiction called "Kennedy Must Be Killed." My late cousin, Chuck Helppie, wrote that. During the course of this, as my first introduction to you, I read "Case Closed." And if I remember the conclusion of "Case Closed" - and it's been some years - that Oswald did have time to fire three shots, because the first one was in the chamber, went over the car, hit concrete, injured a man named Tague, I believe; second shot was a little low through the back near the spine caused him to throw his arms up, third shot after the car had come to a stop caused the president to fall over. And I think it was your book that talked about the president sitting in a back brace and that's why he couldn't fall over after the second shot. Is that a pretty accurate summation there? It's been a while.
Gerald Posner
Absolutely. Your memory is excellent. And Rich, even if you then conclude - even if you look at all the forensics evidence, you look at the shooting, who does the shooting - and you conclude, as I do, that it is Oswald; he's the only assassin in Dealey Plaza that hits anybody that day, you still have the tougher question: is he doing it for himself or is he doing it for some group? People think that if you say Oswald was the shooter at Dealey Plaza, you solve the case but it's not. I think something critical for listeners of The Common Bridge, I went into that book thinking that it was likely the mafia, so I was wrong. I think we all have a bias. People say – as journalists and others - I have no bias at all on a given issue. I'm going to write about Trump, I'm going to write about Biden, I'm going to write about China or COVID, I don't have any feeling. No, we all have - from what we read, we see, we talk to other people - we have an inkling of what we think the story is going to be. I thought the story was likely the mafia because of Ruby's - what looked to me - silencing of Oswald. I changed my mind during the course of it, I didn't think you could solve the case as it was, wasn't the intent of what the book was for Random House. But what you do as a journalist is you do follow that evidence to get there. And I think you're absolutely right what you say about Taibbi, the politicization of writers today and journalists. One of the things I'm so proud of, and I don't know how long this will continue, is that when I have a book out, it's not political, it's about the facts in, let's say, the pharmaceutical industry or in the Vatican or in JFK. People will take it for their own political purposes on the right and the left, they'll take a point that they like and then they'll use that. But I've been able to go on to MSNBC and to CNN and Fox, talking about my books. That's very rare, because nowadays, you tend to get slotted into one or the other; once you appear on Fox, MSNBC doesn't want you, vice-versa. I've written two op-eds on the Sackler family in the last year and a half and one on COVID for The New York Times, but also wrote a piece recently for the Wall Street Journal. Normally, writers fall into one or the other. So I'm doing my best - if I can, in this day and age - to say I'm writing in a nonpartisan manner, people may use it in a partisan way, and I'm talking to both conservatives and the liberals. But I agree with you. It's an increasingly small part of the journalism population that is able to straddle both sides of this, and more should be able to do that.
Richard Helppie
It should be just dispassionate; what the facts reveal, what might the logical conclusion. I can tell you, we've had guests on the show, on The Common Bridge, that have said I went on MSNBC and I quit getting invitations to Fox, or I went on Fox and quit getting invitations to MSNBC. I've seen guests, many of whom I've known for many years, capitulate and fall into one of those camps, writing things that I know they know are not true, because that is what drives clicks and it drives ratings. It's a sacrifice of their soul and integrity in order to make a buck in this new media ecosystem.
Gerald Posner
No, you're right about that. And one of the things...for instance, even on Substack where I am - and my Substack is free, I don't charge for it, because I'm still paying my bill so far by doing other things so I want to keep it as open access to people - I'm not very good about writing outrageous headlines or something that's going to attract a lot of eyeballs. I build it slowly, one at a time. But you do get the ability there to put up things that may not fit directly into one slot or the other. I find for my own purposes, is [that] Substack is an outlet for very much in the middle of journalism of what I do but that's why I call it "Just the Facts." It might be a little boring by MSNBC or Fox standards but that's all right because it allows me to do a little straightforward reporting without worrying about pleasing an editor or an editorial policy of a given magazine or journal for that.
Richard Helppie
Exactly. And that's what we use to turn to reporters for and there are very few left. This is, again, we're thinking about the suspicions that we have in government and the questions around the Kennedy assassination; why Oswald, why Ruby? We had the spate of lone killers - seemingly lone killers, acting with precision. It was not only Oswald and Ruby, but it was Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremmer. Where did they come from? How did they get so close and how are they so effective? Then, of course, we had John Hinckley and I think that's pretty understandable, a mentally ill young man. Then a couple of women took shots at Gerald Ford, weren't very successful. That's where people's suspicions are...really? One more lone gunman? No direct explanation for their actions and gosh, they pulled off these massive crimes that harmed our society.
Gerald Posner
That's right. No, I think you're absolutely right. In my view, and having studied this for so long, the Kennedy assassination is sort of the mother of modern conspiracy theories about government; as the beginning of the loss of faith in government. The reason in particular that assassination starts it off...and you said something very important when you gave that list of lone shooters, assassins; only two of them - one was Oswald and the other was James Earl Ray - instead of going up to their target, the person they wanted to kill, pulling out a revolver and shooting them as Brenner did with Wallace or as Hinkley did with Reagan, there was a rifle shot from a distance and they disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Now, that immediately raises people's suspicions of a professional assassin. "Day of the Jackal," the idea of oh, we've had a rifle shot from a distance, this isn't a typical assassination. Then when the person is arrested for the crime in the case of Oswald or James Earl Ray, people say they're not capable of pulling that off; a high speed rifle shot from a distance, we need a professional assassin, so there's immediate doubt. Then with Oswald, you have him killed 48 hours later in police custody by a man who looks like he's out of central casting for the mafia. There's an answer to why Ruby does that and it's not a conspiracy if you get into the details, but from a superficial view I understand how people look at that and think, boy, there's something fishy. Then what do we do, Rich, we have a government appointed Blue Ribbon Panel, which we have no faith in nowadays anyway, all officials, some of them a former head of the CIA. The CIA and the FBI could be suspects in some people's view and yet they're doing the investigation for the Warren Commission. It turns out years later we learned that there was a cover up by both of those agencies. The CIA was covering up the fact that they were trying to kill a head of state with the mafia. It wasn't Kennedy, but it was Castro. They failed nine times to even wound him. And the FBI was hiding evidence that it was too close to Oswald because J. Edgar Hoover was petrified that somebody would point a finger at the FBI and say, wait, you knew this guy was that unstable and you didn't do anything. Then he got a job on the motorcade route where the President was working. So they had to make sure they knew about Oswald, but not too much. The problem is when the Warren Commission came out with its lone assassin story, this book, it's evidence. There was no one there to defend it over time, as people sort of took potshots at it. So Mark Lane, the lawyer, did a great book called "Rush to Judgment." It attacked the Commission from right to left, a lot of people put out books questioning the Commission. So over time, people lost faith in that lone assassin conclusion. And then what happens? We have Vietnam, we have the government lying to us about the number of deaths and how long the war is taking. We go on to Iran-Contra years later, we have Watergate, we lose faith in the institutions and the government leaders that are supposed to be there for our benefit. So no wonder people start to think, you know what, in all those assassinations I think there was something more behind it and the conspiracies continue to grow. So I do see the Kennedy one as kicking off the modern day loss of faith in government in many ways. And I understand, if they don't study it, why people are suspicious about that case, because there are a lot of things on surface that look fishy until you get into it and look for the facts.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, and one of the things that I only read from you, when they talked about the single bullet theory and that the bullet was pristine and found on the stretcher of Governor Connally, that it was undamaged. But you're the only one I know that actually said, no, I went and actually looked at the bullet and it does have damage to it.
Gerald Posner
You know, it's so fantastic because you had to apply to the government to get access to get in the archives and see the bullet. Everyone's got their gloves on and Trisha was with me and we were able to see it from a distance, you're not able to get it and flip it around or whatever else. But they describe - "they" meaning conspiracy theorists - basically describe it as almost pristine, a virtually pristine bullet. Well, that's like saying a woman is almost pregnant; she's either pregnant or not; it's either pristine or it's not. And that bullet is flattened down on the side. Remember, it's 160 grain, solid metal, full jacketed bullet used in military operations it's supposed to pass through somebody's body. That bullet's developed so that after...the bullets used to explode on hitting a person's body; this [developed bullet] would lead to a wound that could be treated during wartime. The gun that was used was a cheap military rifle that was Italian from World War II and is a good killing machine, although it happens to be an inexpensive gun. And that particular bullet is flattened along the side; you can see where it was. That's the portion of the bullet that hit against Connally's ribs, it passes through Kennedy - the high rear neck area - goes through the president without hitting any bone at all. It's tumbling as it goes directly into Connally, the governor of Texas, sitting in front of the president in the limousine. We know it's tumbling, because the entry wound on the back of the governor is an inch and a quarter long, which is the exact length of the bullet, and it hits his rib on the side - that flatters the bullet down as it comes out and eventually ends up in his thigh where it pops out and flops out when he's being treated in emergency at Parkland Hospital. Now, it's one thing for me to say that and then you say, okay, Gerald, that's an interesting theory, so what, everybody's got a theory. But this was tested by groups, called failure analysis, did [inaudible] work back in '93, and others since then. Today, all day long, you can reproduce that bullet. It wasn't done correctly by the FBI, they didn't have the ballistics knowledge to know how to do it at that point. But today, on tests that have recreated it with two dummies that look exactly like the president and the governor in terms of their size and weight, the distance from where that shot was taken, that shot is fired, the bullet slows up as it goes through the two exactly as it did on that fateful day on November 22, 1963. I reproduced in the book one of the copies of the bullets; in reproduction firing it looks exactly like the exhibit that's at the National Archives.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, and I've been to Dealey Plaza; again, not an investigative journalist, but more of a hobbyist and interested, and I got into the window that Oswald was trying to shoot from and people are saying, oh, it's an impossible shot. I get there and I go, that's not that hard of a shot. When you think about the sequencing - if anybody that's been to a range...first shot's high, adjust; now second shot's too low, third shot - now with a stationary target...high, adjust, low, adjust, boom, head shot. It all made sense to me yet we have shots came from the DelTex building behind Oswald shots, of course, from the grassy knoll, and there were police officers on site that day that had Korean combat experience, that thought shots had come from there but could be echos, that the Secret Service shot Kennedy - which there's no evidence about that - Jim Garrison has his theories, the CIA was involved, the Cubans were involved, the mafia was involved. And I guess based on your reporting, if you put the CIA and the mafia together and in nine attempts they're zero for nine trying to even get a fingernail on Castro, it probably wouldn't have been a successful hit anyway.
Gerald Posner
So interesting you see that Rich, I've always been sort of stymied at the idea that the CIA and the mafia -who really wanted Castro out because the mafia wanted to get their casinos back, they had a lot at stake and the CIA did not like a Soviet agent government 99 miles away from Miami - they had real incentive to get them out. They were keystone cops on the assassination attempts but somehow we're meant to believe that that same unit pulled off the perfect crime in Dallas. When I say the perfect crime it's because here we are coming on 60 years later and duped people - like me - and we can't find what really happened. So no, I don't think that happened. You said something else also of interest, one of the things on the shooting sequence. I think this is key and a lot of people forget it. You mentioned this early on that the bullet's already in the chamber, that starts the clock running. We know how much time there is in between shots because the Zapruder film - which is the home movie of the assassination made that day by Abraham Zapruder, which many people have seen - serves as a time clock; it's 18.3 frames to a second. So you can tell between the frames of the shots how much time. So Oswald takes the first shot and that misses - you're right - and then he adjusts lower, takes a second shot three and a half seconds later. So he has to redo the bolt, aim. He has a 24 power scope, aims, he shoots, misses, it's too low. He then has his longest period five and a half to six seconds for the third shot, that head shot and what happens, coincidentally, is that the driver of the presidential limousine - the oldest member of the security detail that day for the Secret Service, William Greer - he turned around...he told the Warren Commission, I turned around after the first shot, I heard the noise. I saw the president and I turned back around after the second shot and I was zooming out of Dealey Plaza when I heard what sounded like this terrible sound in the back of the third shot. That's not true because the film doesn't lie. He turned around to look at the president after the second shot had been fired. And he's turning back around, the car - which had been moving around 10 to 11 miles an hour's now moving four to five miles an hour - no evasive actions at all. You mentioned before the President is in a sort of a back wrap that's keeping him propped up, his head's rolled a little bit to the left, Jackie is trying to push down on his left elbow to see what's going on and he gives Oswald - the shooter, if you don't want to call it Oswald for people object to that - the straight on shot. So it looks like it's 25 yards away in terms of Oswald scope. He has the full six seconds, he takes the shot and he still almost misses. It hits Kennedy in the high right rear portion of the head, an inch and a half higher it misses and the president lives but that's the nature of assassinations. We now know if Hinkley's shot was an inch over, Reagan could be dead. That's the difference between surviving or not on these. Oswald pulls off - they say he's not a great shot, I agree - three shots, one works and that one just gets in but it's a deadly shot.
Richard Helppie
I know that there's other evidence that he was observed practicing with his rifle and again, not that difficult of a shot. Gerald, when you talk to people about the Kennedy assassination, are there one or two areas that people are most skeptical about, like the arrest of Oswald, like what was he doing in the movies and how do people know he was there to go find him? Or is it Ruby's behavior or something else? Where do people that won't buy into the conclusions in "Case Closed" challenge you the most?
Gerald Posner
I'm surprised that still after all these years, because my book's now 30 years old, that they focus on Dealey Plaza and the shooting sequence, I'd say - and I've never thought of it in that sense, how they break out - but let's say a third or more want to talk about the single bullet. That still has people fascinated. They've seen Oliver Stone, they've seen JFK, they've seen the bullet do a couple of somersaults, decide where it's going to move, make a left turn, the right turn, then go on to hit Kennedy. They think Oliver Stone couldn't be that wrong so there has to be something crazy about that so-called book. Also there are a number of canards that have been repeated, Rich, so many times in different magazine articles by people, whatever else, they believe them to be true; they're very resistant to change their minds. Such as, I often hear that the US military and the FBI went and tried to recreate the sequence of shots that Oswald was supposed to make, and they couldn't do it. No expert in the world could fire it as fast as he could and as accurately. That's just not true, as a matter of fact, they repeated it all day long, [it is in] the early Warren Commission materials so it's just not the case. There is some suspicion about Ruby. But more than anything else, I find this to be the case; they say well, what about the fact that the mafia wanted Kennedy dead, what about the fact that the CIA didn't like him after the Bay of Pigs? My point to that is, I think that there were conspiracies brewing against Jack Kennedy in '61, '62, just as there are probably conspiracies against almost any US president. If we take a snapshot at the time Barack Obama was in or George Bush was in or Donald Trump, the question is - if an assassin makes an attempt or pulls off an assassination - the question is, is that assassin doing it for themselves or for one of the groups that may wanted the president dead. So today we might have anti-abortion activists, we might have Islamic fundamentalists, we might have right wing zealots; there could be any number of suspects. In the day of Kennedy, you could have had mobsters sitting around a table saying, his brother is just trying to break us up, that no good S.O.B., I'm going to make sure he's dead. You could have had somebody in the intelligence or KGB or Castro who knew the CIA was trying to kill him say, I'm going to get Kennedy first. But the challenge that I have for anybody is you've got to tie Oswald into those plots. You can't do it by telepathy. There are no cell phones, no texting, we don't have the internet. So somebody has to visit him in the six weeks or so before the assassination because that's when he returns to the United States after he fails to get into Cuba, where he's trying to get to from Mexico City. No one knew when he went down to Mexico City. The President was visiting Texas. So when he gets back to Texas around October 1 to November 22, where do the plotters bring him in? That's the challenge nobody's been able to answer.
Richard Helppie
And to your point, the trajectory of the bullet...anybody that wants to see, you can go to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where the actual limousine that carried the president and Governor Connolly is there. You can see that the governor's seat is a jump seat and it's inboard. It's not on the door as the president's. It's just one more piece; you can physically walk up to it and look at it and see how the car is set up. So I thought that Oliver Stone's movie was frankly garbage in terms of a serious documentary on him, and Michael Moore probably went to the same school of mockumentary. But recently this topic came up because my understanding is that some new CIA documents came out and there were people - including Robert Kennedy, Jr., RFK, Jr., now running for president - that said, ah ha, you see this confirms our theory that the CIA was involved in the plot to kill President Kennedy. You've looked at these notes and these documents from the CIA. What's in there?
Gerald Posner
Nobody can cite any of the documents that have been released in the National Archives in the last five years - when they're supposed to get the last batches of documents out there, thousands have been released – [nobody can] say it supports in one iota a conspiracy, because they just don't. Now, what happens is...I have looked at those documents, I've gone through them dozens of hours of time. The government did itself a disservice by holding on to these files for so long; they should have released them years ago, the American public had a right to know what the government knew about the assassination. But what we are finding out, Rich, is that the reason they held on to these assassination related files, as they are called, is because they end up having intelligence information about something that the CIA was doing that it wanted not to disclose to the public. So for instance, some of the Mexico City files; everyone wants to know what Oswald was doing in Mexico City. The files that have been released so far talk about the fact that we had agents who were working for us in the Mexican government who were providing information back to CIA assets. That's something the CIA didn't want public for a long time, because those individuals were still alive. Remember, it's coming on 60 years, but people were working for the CIA in their 20s, some of them are still alive. They didn't want information about where they had moved the field offices, for instance, in some of the countries. They held on to information where Yuriy Nosenko - a defector, some of those files were just released - talks about who's running the assassination program for the KGB and how the CIA is trying to penetrate it. So this is a case in which the material that's come out...and I'm angry in some extent about this, I'm angry at the CIA. I understand why they've tried to hold on to it. I know that that's the typical process of protecting means and sources and that, but they should have worked out a deal with the National Archives and the government long ago to say we're going to get everything out there and if we have to redact one name, we'll do it. So this has been a case in which people think, hey, if they have nothing to hide, why don't they let everything out? And I agree, it does make people suspicious while we all sit here and wait for the last documents. But I can say this with confidence that, let's assume for a second, it was a massive conspiracy - Oliver Stone's theory is right - it was in several areas that government [was] involved in killing the president. They did pull off this, what I call, perfect crime, because they haven't been exposed to this day; no deathbed confessions, nothing else. Does anyone really believe that such a diabolically clever plot at the highest level of government will be unmasked 60 years later because one of the plotters forgot to keep a document that exposes the whole conspiracy and sent it over to the National Archives, where it's been sitting for the past few decades waiting for it to be disclosed? It's just not going to happen; if there was such a document, it would have been destroyed long ago. So I hate to be the Debbie Downer in this situation and say you're not going to get a smoking gun document. Maybe that's a bad analogy, but I don't think you're going to get a smoking gun document here.
Richard Helppie
The whole handling of this is kind of the beginning of massive disinformation. And now disinformation, malinformation, misinformation censoring; the tools are so much more powerful. When things aren't reined in or aren't disclosed, suspicions go up and as suspicions go up, it's easier and easier to do things like insert into the consciousness that Donald Trump was having prostitutes urinate on a bed in Moscow. I remember when that story came out, I'm like, I wonder what the facts are. I don't like Trump and wish he had never been president or a candidate but this guy is said to be a germaphobe and he's not dumb. He knows that the hotel rooms in Moscow are monitored and cameras are real tiny these days. How can he trust the women, if they did exist? Yet this was accepted because people wanted to believe it and MSNBC made really a career out of promoting and sensationalizing something that never happened.
Gerald Posner
It is one of the most...and you're right, is separate completely from Trump, who at times, I just I shake my head; he's so the antithesis of what I think of as a reasoned political, quiet leader. But that particular dossier comes out and the first thing you're doing, if you're an investigative journalist, is testing it - trying to if you had access to it - you'd be going back and trying to track down some of the sources and the places and see what it was. That's what you think the government would do. But what happened in terms of the media, and this is unfortunate in terms of journalism, is that otherwise good journalists - I'm not talking about the hosts on the shows who frequently are just commentators who are bringing in ratings - they would have decent legal analysts on, they would have national security people on, they would have historians on. Who I would look at, because I flip the channels; I look at Fox, I look at MSNBC, I look at CNN, I want to see what they're all saying. MSNBC in particular, the people that I would have thought would be much more judicious in their approach were in fact the cheerleaders for the most horrific interpretation of that and embracing the truthfulness of that particular dossier. And when it later proves not to be true, there's no mia culpa, no apology. In this way that we are today, people just move on to the next thing. It's as though you're an analyst on CNBC predicting whether IBM is going to hit $100 or $20 and two analysts disagree and the one who's wrong never admits they were wrong. The same thing is happening here. It's really unfortunate because these partisan camps that we have put ourselves in, and that journalists often join in and historians join in on, really does a disservice. Because most people, Rich - this isn't a surprise to you, won't be a surprise to your readers, to your listeners - they aren't getting their news from three sources, they're getting it from one; they're watching MSNBC all the time or Fox all the time, they want to hear what they already like. I will talk to somebody who's an MSNBC only viewer and there are things that factually have taken place on a story like the Trump dossier or other issues regarding the border or whatever, and they're just unaware of it because it's not covered there. That's where they're getting their news and I think that it's a major fault, we have more information than ever and people are getting less informed than ever in some ways.
Richard Helppie
And when the Durham report came out, it was kind of a to the ramparts move on MSNBC, basically taking the same disproven things that they had reported on before and using it to try to counter the Durham report, like the laughable Trump Tower meeting. You remember the hoax about there was a computer connection between Trump Tower and a bank in Russia. My background is computer systems and so I remember when that story came out, I'm like, what are they talking about, that's not even feasible. Of course, it turned out to be nothing at all and yet the guy that promoted it was found not guilty by a DC jury, Mark Sussmann.
Gerald Posner
That's right and I watched the hearings with Durham coming up before the House Committee and Jerry Nadler as the Democrat on that committee was asking questions still about that connection to the bank, that digital connection. Did you ever investigate it? You spent $6 million and you've had some people leave your investigation while you were doing it and you produced only two indictments, is that right? And both of those failed to get a conviction. So you still see...I expect that on the Hill but it's disappointing in that we're so far apart that you're just ready for a food fight, day in and day out. I look back to the older days, and they are indeed old days, I would have problems maybe with Bob Dole or somebody else but those - the old line senators that used to think or the people in Congress that you could come to an agreement with the other side, it meant you had to compromise, you weren't happy, you didn't get everything you wanted. They didn't get everything they wanted, but you didn't have the base of your party ready to charge the party and say, we'll never vote for you again. I think the internet, social media, has definitely made it worse. I use the internet, I'm on social media, as you know, I find it a useful tool but I also think that it tends to be an echo chamber, so that people often hear just what they want and they get more engaged and locked into their viewpoints so it becomes more difficult to persuade them to move to the middle.
Richard Helppie
Just to put a cap on this part of it; the facts are there that the entire Steele Report, as it was captioned, was bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through Perkins Coie, through Fusion GPS, through Glenn Steele - that's under sworn testimony and documentary evidence, that's what occurred - yet today, you can't get half the country to admit that that's what did occur.
Gerald Posner
One thing on that, Rich, which is so interesting...so as a reporter, as a journalist that does investigative work, if you tell me that - and I happen to say that I agree, that that's correct – but that doesn't tell me whether the dossier is real or not so I'm not surprised. In a presidential election, the other party will do what I call some dirty work, hire somebody to go ahead and get a dossier or a file full of dirt on the candidate. That's unfortunately, the way that dark politics works, I get that. So when you tell me all of that, I would think that it would be easy for a democratic enthusiast to admit, yes, that's what happened because that doesn't mean the dossier is right or wrong; you then have to determine that on its own. Turns out the dossier is false. It doesn't have any correct information so they weren't buying something that was real and they probably didn't care about that. But it's interesting that the fact that the Hillary campaign, through this cut-out, was doing that - that doesn't surprise me - the question becomes what did they get for their money? They got something that turned out to be good, because they got the FBI chasing a story that was fake.
Richard Helppie
Well, the way I look at these things is I'm kind of like the dog that didn't bark theory. I said, okay, what didn't I hear in that scenario? Well, what I didn't hear was the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign taking credit for finding out that Trump had done all these things in Moscow and colluded. Because if it was true, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops; look, we found this on the guy. So the fact that they're saying nothing about it, that to me speaks volumes.
Gerald Posner
That's right. Although the other thing that happens...well, they have their own sources as reporters - the big national papers and magazines. So you'll see reporting, the Washington Post, that's making their talking point on a specific day regarding it. And it's much better for the Hillary campaign, or for any campaign, to have a national reporter to procedures newspaper raising the issues and points that you would like to raise. It doesn't look as though it's political.
Richard Helppie
This has been a great conversation, by the way, because this is what I'm trying to get to; with the Fourth of July coming up and our quest for a more perfect union. I don't think the founders and framers would be surprised that we are not a perfect union, because we're still a work in progress. Are we on a good track? Are we on a bad track? I often challenge people; if you're going to design a government today from the ground up on a blank sheet of paper, what would the structure look like? It's hard to imagine something that would look a lot different from what we have but I believe it's being abused, and it's being abused because you have to have people in there with good character. So that's why I did the story about Harry Truman, the story today with you about the way things are being reported. You've been involved in some other topics, if we could spend a little time on that.
Gerald Posner
One of the things is I've been spending the last few months looking into is the question of gender affirming care for minors 18 and under; this what I call explosion or contagion almost in young kids at 12, 13, 14, 15 thinking they're another gender. TikTok videos, chat rooms available and medical communities, and The Endocrine Society and the American Society Pediatrics, that have embraced this idea that you, as a child, can be put on blockers that stop your natural puberty and then put on hormones for the other sex and then eventually transition into surgery. I will tell you that I just ran a piece a week ago in the Wall Street Journal called "The Truth about Puberty Blockers" in which I think that they border almost on child abuse, because of the level, the amount of harm that's documented that's being ignored. One of the things that has happened, there was a decision the other day by a federal appeals court that overturned the ban in Arkansas, on puberty blockers. That's going to be appealed and continued to be fought in courts. But we have entered a situation that I really think, in ten years or 15 years, and hopefully sooner than that - I hope I'm not wrong on this - we will look back and say, what were we thinking? What were doctors thinking? You know, you talked about this, you had a broadcast on this, and you talked about lobotomies in the 30s and how science and doctors thought they were good ideas. At some point, I do think we're going to be looking back and wondering how we went this far out on children, the most vulnerable patients, to think that they're capable of giving full consent. I'm walking on a very, very fine line here, because the landmine here is that Republicans are considered to be passing laws to ban puberty blockers. That's what the progressives think and the Republicans think that every progressive just wants to put a child into the assembly line for trans surgery. I'm trying to do an approach that is harsh and critical on the industry and on the money that has funded it but at the same time not find myself representing one of the political camps. I said no to a couple of offers to do television or cable shows after the op-ed ran because I didn't want to immediately be considered the person coming from this position, if that makes sense. I'm just plugging ahead, about to find out maybe in the next month or two, if a traditional publisher like mine - Simon and Schuster, or somebody else - may want a journalist to take a look at this in a book for a couple of years and come up with the story of how we got here and what's happening. I don't know if any publisher will be willing to do it, a traditional publisher, my fingers are crossed that they will.
Richard Helppie
Well, I like the way that you're approaching the issue. It is contentious and it's a very delicate issue. Yet it's trying to be overwhelmed by both sides with catchphrases. The whole notion of quote, gender, but affirming care means that if a young person comes in and says they want to be called by pronouns of a different gender, if you don't do that, you're not affirming. Well, now we know that there might be reasons that you don't want to do that, that the child is depressed, that the child has autism; the answer can't be the start of this chain of events that's going to lead to a surgery.
Gerald Posner
I was just going to say, one thing you said that is important there, this idea of what they call social transitioning, which is using the pronouns, the name, dressing the child in the other clothes. Even the Dutch, who started puberty blockers in 1998 said, by the way, don't embrace social transitioning because if you do you'll get false positives; the children will be more susceptible to saying I want to go into puberty blockers and hormones because you've already started them off on the path. Whereas here in the States, if you misgender someone you can get into trouble. So they've totally embraced that aspect. Regarding the developmental problems - six times the rate, trans children, in terms of being affected by depression, having instances of autism, other problems along the way. We really are not considering those. But what happens is - one last thing - there's a thing called watchful waiting. That's what some of the Europeans do. Watch the child and see if the child, on their own, grows out of it. Is it an adolescent phase? 13 year olds who want to be Superman one day, want to be a girl the next day, they lost very little time in the cases in which they did not do social transitioning and they did not start them on puberty blockers, 85% in a [inaudible] study, went through and said, I'm not really the other gender. Most of those turned out to be gay. All right, that's fine. They had passed through puberty without wanting to change their gender. You needed to give them some waiting time and that's what's not being done in the current medical rules.
Richard Helppie
Well, the NHS has done a study in England that the correlation between autism and youth reporting gender dysphoria is unmistakable. Those that know autism, an autistic child can focus in on one idea and not be able to change that. When I think about the trust factor in society the thought occurred to me, how much money and organization does it take to spread an idea so fast? School boards, local governments, state governments, the federal government mandating language changes; medical schools, now media, all on the same sheet of music. Johns Hopkins, in recent days, saying that a lesbian is a non-man attracted to a non-man, like I just can't imagine the amount of money and organization. In preparing for my interview with Leor Sapir, I tried to get trans activists to come on. There are some really well funded NGOs out there that have an agenda; I'm like, where did the money come from and what's the end game?
Gerald Posner
I'm definitely looking into where the money came from. I do think that there are a handful of activist billionaires who have funded it for a while. But the other thing is that the greatest thing that happened for the trans activist community was the ability, in the late 90s or thereabouts, to attach the T to LGB. So you have lesbian, gay, bisexual movement that was fighting for rights, that eventually fought for the rights of protection and not being discriminated against, then fought for marriage, was able to win the rights for marriage, and then fought for the rights for adoption, having children and won that right. Then once the "T" gets attached to it - and it's not like a light switch, it happens over time, there's lobbying - it means that transgender - for most people, big corporations, schools, others - becomes a gay rights issue. And if it's a gay rights issue, they have to follow the orthodoxy, which says, don't discriminate against a small handful of people, you have to go out of your way to do whatever they say, you should be able to accept them. And that's what I think has happened. It would be as if there was a social rights movement for what I used to call graveyard shift workers, midnight to eight in the morning, and somehow they got themselves attached to racial preferences or whatever; they were thought of in the same way, it became a racial issue, people would be bending over backwards to make sure that they were treated better. The same thing has happened here in some ways. I think that that was the moment at which the debate changed. Plus, many people that I talked to say, it doesn't affect me. If I don't have a trans child, it's not an issue. They don't realize, not only the harm being done to many children, thousands and thousands of children, but even to medical research down the road, when doctors are trying to decide how much funding for breast cancer and four or five percent of a sample group may be biological men but identifying as women, that cancer rate looks lower. So breast cancer doesn't get as much funding. There are all types of subsidiary issues as a society, which I don't think many people are focusing on.
Richard Helppie
A local ad here in Detroit for one of the big health systems, here's a patient saying, when my chest cancer was there...and it reminded me of when I interviewed Trisha, where she was really offended by that, and rightly so; the research needs to be fact based. We need to take a pause on this. When I look at the logic of puberty blockers or the social transitioning - start with social transitioning - there's no backward paths. If Susie says she wants to be Robert, and later says, maybe I really am Susie. Oh, no, no, no, no, you're being brave to be Robert. We're not affirming you if you if you say you want to be Susie, then okay, well, I still don't feel like I'm that next gender. Well, the puberty blockers, so maybe you're 13 and you're not developing as fast so we put you on that for two years. Now your peers are 15, they've developed and now you're less like them.
Gerald Posner
That's right. You're more ostracized, you're more different. It's very interesting what you said because if you are, you have troubles, you have body dysmorphia, you don't like the way your body looks, you're not so sure of yourself, you're not a popular kid. Once you come out at most schools - and Americans, who by the way, identify instead as Jane not John - you are encouraged by your teachers, everybody else as what a brave decision. Fantastic. Your parents are told you're brave. You go to being the kid who was unpopular to being the most popular in school, and if you ever change your mind and try to be a regretter or a D-transitioner - and I've spoken to some of them - the pressure not to do that is tremendous. People say you couldn't even decide your own sex. Trisha often says that when she was a child, she was a tomboy, a word you can't use anymore. She used to have boys as friends and liked to play with trucks and everything else. Nobody ever suggested maybe you should really be a boy. She probably would have thought of that as just the phase she was going through. But I do think that that happens in terms of of children, the pressure put on them. You know, Rich, so very well the power of language and the people who are marketing this know it so now puberty blockers...because after I'd done the piece in the journal and there's more criticism about them, I see that Scientific American had a doctor recently who suggested that they should appropriately be called "puberty pause." So somebody's thinking of the marketing because they think "blockers," that sounds big, you're blocking something that you shouldn't be doing. But “puberty pause” sounds like you're just holding the light switch for half a second before you turn it on. They're clever in terms of doing this. So we may be seeing more puberty pause in the future than puberty blockers.
Richard Helppie
I've never heard that phrase, by the way, but I'm not sure that their marketing people have thought this through. Because we all had friends that when we were in the seventh grade, needed to shave, and we were like hitting our 20s and in my Nordic background that wasn't that big of a consideration. If someone says pause, it's like, no, no, no, no, I don't want to.
Gerald Posner
Absolutely so true. Look, I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in San Francisco. A lot of guys in grammar school, by the seventh or eighth grade had a little bit of shadow growth; that's true.
Richard Helppie
I shouldn't make light of it. But this is one of the things about language, to your point that the language shifts when you finally root out what the real facts are; well, we're going to shift the language. As you pointed out, we as the United States, we're going against more progressive countries, Finland and Norway and the United Kingdom, and I believe Sweden. Now, this is not a great idea. I'm wondering, Josef Mengele, given some of the things he did as a Nazi, is there any parallel when you started examining the transgender things?
Gerald Posner
The Nazis, they did a lot of horrible experiments, we don't even know...Mengele, his papers were lost after the war so it's not even clear what he was trying to do. But there's nothing like this. Let's assume for a second...I'll give you a hypothetical. Let's assume that Mengele was taking children, boys and they were twins. So one was a control, one was the experiment who had the equivalent of a medication that could block the development of puberty while they were in the camp for those two and a half years, and then started to give them hormones from the opposite sex to see if they could become more feminized or more masculinized. Could he create a different sex in a child, as one of the pioneers in the gender industry did in the 20s, and 30s; essentially, could nurture be more important than nature? If I told you they were doing that - and forget for a second even going on to surgeries; removing a penis, doing a double mastectomy on a girl at 12 and 13, removing the breast - you would say, appropriately so, that's war crime. If that's what the Nazis were doing, that's a war crime. Today, we're calling it gender affirming care, because it's been endorsed by the American Pediatric Society and The Endocrine Society. It's remarkable to me that in 75 years, we've moved from one end of the perspective...I don't mean to in any way diminish the Holocaust or the crimes that were committed there and don't mean to say that it's the same, but I understand your point precisely. Anybody who's unable to see that underestimates, I think, the shift in the paradigm in what has happened in two generations.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, I one hundred percent concur. Again, people can find you on Twitter, Substack, Forbes.
Gerald Posner
And I have a website called posner.com, just my last name, on there. There's information on each of the books, some reviews, maybe there's some videos. I also have a YouTube channel that I only put something up when it's fresh, like yours, but there's a YouTube channel with videos that go back 30 years. There's a fantastic 17 minute - if I could give one plug - 17 or 18 minute segment, where I am on Phil Donahue in 1986 and the guest is Roth Mengele, the only son of the Nazi war criminal. It's a riveting 18 minutes of television, very, very tense, live television at its best. That's up there.
Richard Helppie
So YouTube as well. You wrote a book about the children of the Nazis, correct?
Gerald Posner
When, Rich, I'd gone to Random house and said...by the way, before Oliver Stone had done his film, I'd always been interested in the Kennedy assassination, so I went to them and said, what about a book not finding who killed Kennedy, but I said, I'm examining all the evidence, can't be the KGB, the CIA, the FBI, everybody else. I'll give you a primer of what the real evidence is. We'll do a book like that. Read that book before you read anything else. And they said, no one's interested in a book like that. So I went off and did a book on the sons and daughters of top Nazi war criminals, Hitler's children. In the time that I was working on that book; Oliver Stone did JFK. It's the only good thing he ever did, I say, for me because he energized the Kennedy assassination for the American public - great film-making, terrible documentarian in history. I went back to Random house and they said, sure we can do that book, there's a market even for a small book like that. It wasn't supposed to be "Case Closed" but that's how I got from Hitler's children to Kennedy.
Richard Helppie
I love the journey. Gerald, any closing comments for the listeners, readers and viewers of The Common Bridge?
Gerald Posner
I just think viewers of The Common Bridge, people who were already listening to you, understand the importance of doing what you said before, testing what they're reading, if they read something that absolutely leaves them slack jawed, they can't get over it and they think, oh, my God, I never heard that anywhere else, is that possible? Then there's a reason why you may not have heard it anywhere else. It may be good or it may not be or you might just be getting the first draft of a breaking story that's going to change history, like Watergate, but the odds are that it could also be a politicized piece that has pushed the edges of what's true. All of us are short of time. We don't have time in the modern society to be fact checkers on journalists but you do end up following the journalists that you are comfortable with, who you have some faith in. You may not always agree. I say that...people think that as a journalist, I want people to agree with me. No, I want them to read my work and see what is the basis of the evidence that I use to draw my conclusions and at the end of that, you can still disagree; somebody can read "Case Closed" and say, I still think it's a conspiracy for XYZ and I'll debate that all day long with you. But we've got to get out of the name calling. So I urge your your viewers to find the journalists that you're comfortable with who at least are going to report something and give you an insight into what's happening in this topsy-turvy wild world of ours.
Richard Helppie
I think that's a great conclusion to our talk today. My brand promise is every episode there's something for everyone to not like, and keep coming back because we're not doing affirmation programming. We've been talking today with leading investigative journalist, Gerald Posner, a wide ranging discussion about trust in journalism, about the facts behind the Kennedy assassination, about new issues in the news today, transgenderism and others. Again, I encourage you to follow him on any of the platforms. This is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
(Watch, Listen or Read) Did the Kennedy Assassination Start the Era of Mistrust?