Robert Ellsberg at 4:26:
I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what what drove you into this new line of research that became really—it’s occupied decades of your life now.

Jim Douglass at 4:41:
I think maybe two things in particular. One was Dr. King’s assassination. Because my students at the University of Hawaii at the time compelled me to join them by their example and that changed my life, becoming a peace and justice activist not just a professor of it. But secondly, when I wrote a book a number of years later for you called The Nonviolent Coming of God book for Orbis, I was researching Jesus of Nazareth, and I learned how to do historical research through that. That directly led me to the assassinations of all four of these people because it made me go more deeply into Dr. King’s assassination and then John Kennedy’s and Malcolm’s and RFK’s....

at 7:45:
The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis which actually takes up the entire last chapter, the book that we talk about now, is a foundation of my faith in the power of God or, if you put in another dimension, of the Buddha. It is grace. It is grace that we even exist today. Because had he not turned to his enemy and his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, not turned to him, we’d be in a nuclear wasteland. There wouldn’t be any Earth. And that’s an untold story.

I can think of hundreds of people who could have investigated that better than I, but they chose not to. I think it’s the unspeakable, what Thomas Mertton referred to as the unspeakable. It’s where we don’t want to go. And I’m still, kind of in a state of wonder that somebody didn’t write this story far, far earlier. It’s been out there. There’s a huge documentation available. There’s all these witnesses that I interviewed that were around and the members of the administration. It’s all all out there. So why hasn’t somebody else written this book before me? I don’t know....

It’s an incredible story. Incredible story. And as as you know, the middle section of the book is The Way. And each of them is on his particular personal way. But that way as the story develops—by the way I didn’t, this isn’t where I wrote an outline of a book or I’m following an outline. It was an experiment with truth. I’ve tried to explain that at the beginning of each of my books, I’m a disciple of Gandhi who’s a disciple of Jesus and it helps that he’s a Hindu. So that sort of breaks open the whole experiment with truth.

So all I did was follow the evidence and follow the leads. I did not calculate how to write that book. And as you know, as my editor-publisher, you made critical suggestions toward the end, ‘Well, you might want to reverse this or that.’ I view that as providence and a beautifully insightful editor-publisher who looks at something and says, ‘Yeah, well, you might want to twist this a little bit.’ And that’s part of the process, too. That’s the experiment with truth.

I mean, and thousands upon thousands literally, of researchers did work on this before I ever got to it. I’m a very late comer. 1990s, my god. I mean, these things happened in the ’60s. So all these good researchers—all I tried to do was connect the dots....

at 14:09:
They both [JFK and RFK] had to die. There are two big Whys. The the first is of course, Why are they killed? But the second that’s more key in a way is Why are they willing to live in such a way that they really know they’re going to be killed? And there are very explicit statements by both of them, which I cite in various places, telling colleagues or even telling their enemies, like Kennedy telling George Bolshakov, Khrushchev’s agent in Washington, that he’s going to be killed if he keeps working with Khrushchev the way he is. And Robert Kennedy saying that to George Bolshakov and saying, Doesn’t Khrushchev understand that the risks my brother is taking in order to talk with you behind the scenes and negotiate, keep us from having a global war?

So there are these two Whys complementing each other: The Why of why the national security state is getting ready to crush them, but Why are they willing to keep on going knowing that? That’s incredible courage. Courageio as Kennedy wrote in his book Profiles In Courage....

at 18:44:
Scapegoats all; four scapegoats. The cover up is critically important, so deeply so, that the scenario of assassinating these people is totally integral with the cover up and the cover up is all set up before the assassination. These are scenarios. They’re movies. They’re actually scripts written. James Jesus Angleton, a critical figure in all of this, who was of course the Counter Intelligence head of the Central Intelligence Agency for so long a period of time, he put this stuff together especially. But there were others. It was systemic, But Angleton was the genius in a way.

He actually talked about it towards the end of his life to a man [Paul Craig Roberts] in the Reagan administration who put it on record online. I cite all of these things and how Angleton shows how he has plots within plots within plots and the whole idea is to keep confusing people. The more deeply they go into the weeds of the assassination, the more confused they’re going to be because of the extreme intelligence.

James Jesus Angleton was a brilliant poet in college and knew T.S. Elliot. He was a genius but he used his genius in a way that is not helpful. But I think we too have to even get into the mind of Angleton. I have a pretty long section on our brother James Jesus—is his middle name—Angleton....

at 21:24:
William F. Pepper, the lawyer for the King family, and with the huge courage of the King family—I stand and bow to them—created this trial that I had the grace to attend from beginning to end. I didn’t miss a day. It was from November 15th to December 8th, 1999. Closed out the 20th century and [Barbara Reis] sitting next to me, who was a reporter from Portugal who came in for a few days because one of the key involvers in the assassination was from Portugal, she said to me as we walked out one day, [“Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”] Me, a reporter from Portugal and you a writer of books. She just shook her head and that was the question for me. How come this isn’t filled with with reporters? The unspeakable. People did not want to go there. The media did not want to go there. They were there one day when Coretta Scott King walked in and she was a key witness. But beyond that they did not want to go there....

at 24:06:
It’s our story. It’s not something that happened in the 1960s simply. It’s our story. It’s a story of humanity and it’s a story of how we’re meant to live, to choose life, to choose the life of everyone on this planet. There’s no exception. People have—we all have our favorite bogeys in terms of our own enemy caricatures and we pick out the worst and then say, Well that justifies the worst in myself. But that’s not the way.

at 25:38:
If we don’t know these stories, we don’t know our story. We don’t know where, what—we’re living in chaos right now. The world is in chaos. Chaos of violence and oppression in many different areas. How did we get here? We got here because our government, as Dr. King said in his April 4, 1967 speech, one year to the day before he died, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” He didn’t say the government. He accepted it as his government. That means it’s his responsibility to change the process. And he did everything he could during that final year by resisting the Vietnam War and trying to abolish poverty in the United States by the Poor People’s Campaign, which he didn’t live to lead.

But if we don’t understand that, we don’t understand why the government we have today is such a total disaster. But it’s worse than a disaster. It’s the greatest purveyor of terrorism in the world today. So we can update it to that and that’s why I start with Albert Camus in the very Introduction to the book where he, at the end of World War II and as a resistor to the Nazis, is reflecting on the age of fear and of actual terrorism which is going to result in this century to follow. And it did. Camus was a great prophet in that sense.

Unless we understand where we’ve been and what we have not come to terms with, what we have the unspeakable reality of our own evil—I’m talking about our government’s evil and our participation in it. How do we participate in it? Oh, well, you know, is there anything we do throughout the year in which we help finance the government? Huh? I don’t finance, oh, April 15th. Huh? What do I do on April 15th? Anyhow, there are a lot of questions when you go—the deeper you go, the more questions there are in this story. And they all come back to ourselves and The Way that we were meant to live. Choose life.

Robert Ellsberg at 28:16:
That’s really I think—it comes through very strongly in both books: that yes it’s important that we know how they died, why they died but why they died had a lot to do with how they lived.

Jim Douglass
Exactly.

Robert Ellsberg
And as I said that kind of journey that they were on that was cut short but that they were willing to sacrifice their lives for and that it’s in knowing that kind of story that maybe inspires us to share that vision of that dream and to work as hopefully and courageously as they did to make it real.

Jim Douglass at 28:53:
If we can’t live absorbing those lives, they are dead. But they’re not dead. Because people throughout the world have caught on to what these people, these four great human beings, were doing and the movement that they represented which of course was tens of thousands—millions—of people were moving in that period of time and they were following those people. So unless the people get ahead of the leaders, and the leaders start to follow, there is no movement. In a sense, the key to that leadership is right here, right here. You and I, all of us. And unless we can learn to resurrect in our lives, those human beings, there is no resurrection. That’s what the whole biblical resurrection is all about. Resurrecting in our lives. It’s not about something that happens somewhere in the afterlife. It’s absorbing in our lives the courage to choose life.