Grover's Take on Things

The Oxford Dictionary says “gobsmacked” is a Britishism meaning “utterly astonished or astounded.”

They could add “See also: Grover’s reaction when he learned that the Youtube video of his most recent lecture in Dallas has now registered more than 21,500 views!”

I quickly did the math and discovered that’s an average of 120 views every day since its posting.

Now, I recognize this response is minuscule compared with Gangnam Style (2.6 billion) or any of a whole host of Taylor Swift or funny cat videos. But for a lecture (ugh; no music or dancing or feline frolics) — about a relatively small part of an “acquired-taste” subject (the JFK Assassination) — much less, a lecture by me! Well, suffice it to say I was quite amazed and very humbled. Gobsmacked.

Below is the video, as produced, edited, and posted by Tom Keener, Director of the lecture series that hosted the event, and his excellent staff. The first 59 minutes is my lecture on “The Raleigh Call.” The remainder is the question-and-answer session, where I was joined on stage by fellow researcher Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. The Q&A went on for over an hour; the audience members simply kept coming up with great questions and were eager to ask them!

The lecture content comprised the research I’ve done since 1980 about a telephone call Lee Oswald attempted to place from the Dallas jail to a man living in Raleigh, North Carolina. My first two articles were published by Spectator Magazine, appropriately in Raleigh, which also happens to be my home town. (The story of working with my friend, co-researcher, and mentor, Spectator‘s founder and publisher Bernie Reeves, would make an entire and very interesting article in itself. Thanks, Bernie!)

In my lecture, I present the subject as two concentric stories: (1) the actual phone event on the night of November 23, 1963, surrounded by (2) how what we knew about the call at various times since 1963 has influenced what we infer about Oswald himself. In 1964, when the Warren Commission was investigating, we (and the members of the Commission) knew absolutely nothing about the call. In 1968 and for ten years thereafter, a very few people had some information about it, but several key “facts” later proved to be incorrect.

From 1977 until 1980, a government agency (the House Select Committee on Assassinations) finally and thoroughly investigated the “Raleigh Call.” They came to these conclusions: that Oswald did, indeed, attempt to place the call, and that it did not go through for mysterious and unknown reasons. They found the event “real … substantiated … very troublesome … [and] deeply disturbing”; and that it raised questions that remain “unanswered,” makes inferences which are “ultimately inconclusive,” and is therefore an “unanswerable mystery.” Having decided all of that, the Committee completely ignored the Raleigh Call when writing their final Report, and promptly classified all of their internal investigation documents related to it.

Achingly slowly, these documents are being declassified, and I have been harvesting them over the years. I have written a 15,000-word manuscript which I believe contains everything we now know about the Raleigh Call, and what it implies about who Lee Oswald was.

I’m the first to say that this topic does not speak to the who, how, or why of the assassination itself. But the implications are huge of Oswald attempting to place a call, while incarcerated for the killing of a U.S. president, to a former Special Agent of U.S. Army Counterintelligence.

As I have done for over 40 years, I’ll leave my writings and lectures to speak for themselves in the marketplace of ideas. I would be most eager to know what you think about it all.