1975 SPECIAL REPORT: “THE AMERICAN ASSASSINS“( PARTS 1&2)

Before moving to 60 Minutes at the end of 1975, Dan Rather was a correspondent in a few more CBS Reports and CBS News Special Reports, most prominently “CBS Inquiry: The American Assassins,” a multi-hour review of the shocking series of assassinations over the last dozen years—the murders of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the near-fatal shooting of Governor George Wallace. Producer Leslie Midgley recalls in his memoirs how Dan Rather called him one day and invited him for lunch to talk about an idea for a show: “Dan said he had become interested in this project because when he lectured on college campuses, the questions most frequently asked by students were about the assassinations. It was indeed often suggested that all three murders might have been linked in one enormous conspiracy.“ In a poll later commissioned by CBS, an astonishing 46 percent of the persons polled believed that there was some connection between the three assassinations and the atte