For Sunshine Week 2014, audio expert Ed Primeau explained his forensic analysis of a recently discovered audio recording from November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy died.
His comments point to a revelatory audio recording that the U.S. government has never made public in the 50 years since JFK’s assassination.
The recording captures communications to and from Air Force One, the presidential jet as it carried President Kennedy’s body back from Dallas to Washington on that fateful day.
Forensic science
Primeau’s detective work shows that the tape, discovered in 2011 in the estate of Gen. Chester Clifton, military aide to JFK, was heavily edited, “At least 15 times,” Primeau says.
Primeau says he has “no doubt” the Clifton tape was extracted from a longer recording that has never been heard publicly. The existence of an original unedited Air Force One tape from November 22, 1963, has has never been acknowledged by the White House or the Defense Department.
The original tape, if it still exists and becomes public, would be a revelatory and possibly game-changing document about the still controversial question of who killed JFK. The original tape would constitute a real-time record of the reaction of the U.S. armed forces to the assassination of a sitting president. (Emphasis added.)
An even more heavily edited version of the Air Force One tape was released by the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library in 1979.
The analyst
Primeau, nationally known for his analysis of sound recordings in the George Zimmerman murder trial, serves as an expert witness in litigation involving audio and video evidence.