“There’s so much bitterness I thought they would get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it.”
– Robert Kennedy on the afternoon of JFK’s assassination, according to Justice Dept. spokesman Edwin Guthman, who was with RFK at Hickory Hill (Brothers, by David Talbot, p.4).
It’s been said that Robert Kennedy was the first conspiracy theorist (of his brother’s death), and that he first suspected the CIA. He recognized that it was not naive to suspect foul play in his brother’s death, and while publicly he made dry, one sentence endorsements of the WC, he and Jackie always believed privately that there was a conspiracy – according to multiple, credible sources.
Justin,
Jackie’s mother, Janet, knew LBJ was behind it right from the start. It seems to me, though, that Jackie had blinders on about conspiracy. Well, she had two young children to rear, and she fled abroad soon after Bobby was slaughtered, saying (something like), “I don’t want my children to grow up in a country that guns down its best citizen.”
According to Robert Vaughn (Man from UNCLE) in his memoir, A Fortunate Life, Ari Onassis once screamed about her, “She’s the only adult in the world who doesn’t know it was a conspiracy!”
Also, RV has pretty good proof that AO put up the big bucks to assassinate RFK.
Though Bobby was pretty disgusted with Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans, I believe RFK knew, by his last days, that a massive plot was behind his brother’s death. He had his most trusted detectives looking into it. He probably figured he would blow the lid off if he became president. Always “tomorrow, tomorrow” like Hamlet.
Bobby should have checked Jack’s casket at Andrew’s AFB, if only to say goodbye to his brother before the autopsy. It was like, “Oh well, water under the bridge.” His eyes were glued on Jackie. “Let’s deal with the next crisis.” While the last, really present one, wasn’t resolved.
And Bobby could be an inconsiderate s.o.b. with his subordinates. He made a lot of enemies for Jack. IMHO.
I’d be really interested for the lid on my ignorance to be lifted about what proof Vaughn has that Onassis had Bobby killed.
Justin,
Sorry it took so long to get back. I dug out Vaughn’s book and then got off on a tangent looking at related trails.
In A Fortunate Life pp 258-65 is RV’s account of finding out about Onassis’ funding the RFk assass. Two sources: 300 pages of Peter Evans’ book Nemesis; RV’s acquaintance, Helene Gaillet, was in the Jackie-Onassis circle, and AO, in failing health, confessed to HG in 1973 that he put up the money for RFK’s murder. Gaillet told her account to Vaughn in 2007, and she told Evans about it 1983 and 2003.
There’s a tangled mess that goes back to 1953 when RFK worked for Roy Cohn on Joe McCarthy’s commie witch-hunt. One of Bobby’s assignments was to investigate “blood trade,” trade between American allies and Red China during the Korean War. And RFK’s finding was that at least 300 Greek-American families, not Onassis, were trading with China, but since AO was negotiating to transport Saudi oil on his ships under false Saudi flag, RFK had sealed indictments made that would seize any AO ships in American harbors. Which cost AO a lot of money.
Then it gets worse. I believe it’s all tied up with Israel secretly acquiring nukes, the USS Liberty (now there’s an unusually idiotic military mess) and the Six Days War. Just like DDE’s pronouncement on his way out the door, “Beware the MIC!” Ike also dumped Israel’s nuclear program in JKF’s lap, merely asking for an explanation from Israel, on practically the last day of his term! JFK kept continuous pressure on Israel about it, so much that Ben Gurion quit in a huff to work on the facilities at Dimona and Beersheba. Then, of course, Jack was eliminated and Israel got their nukes sometime between the Six Days War (and the murder of SS Liberty) in 1967 and the murder of RFK in 1968, exactly one year later. No one knows exactly when they got them or how many to this day.
I believe RFK’s assassination was pulled off by elements of Mossad, other right wing world elements, and our own CIA and military. And they tried to stick it on an Arab “nut”, just like Marxist nut LHO. When it couldn’t have been further from the truth, though a few Arabs were in it for the big bucks, and to keep the war-machine mess going. Kind of like JFK, but more cosmopolitan.
It didn’t really end until Al Lowenstein was murdered spring 1980, on the verge of a commitment from Jimmy Carter to re-open the RFK case if he was re-elected. We know how that worked out.
The remark by JFK about LBJ being President, I believe, shows us that JFK didn’t choose LBJ for Veep because he wanted to.
Here is an RFK quote of an especially nasty LBJ quote.
Author Gus Russo: In his oral history, Robert Kennedy bitterly recounted a remark that Johnson made to someone else after the assassination. “When I was young in Texas, I used to know a cross-eyed boy,” Johnson said. “His eyes were crossed, and so was his character… That was God’s retribution for people who were bad – and you should be careful of cross-eyed people because God put his mark on them … Sometimes I think that what happened to Kennedy may have been divine retribution.”
JFK himself had slightly crossed eyes.
[Leo Janos, LBJ speechwriter, Church Committee interview by Rhett Dawson, Oct. 14, 1975 … also Gus Russo, Live by the Sword, p. 377]
Jackie Kennedy in her oral history: “Bobby told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, ‘Oh, God, can you imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?'” … “He didn’t like the idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country. Bobby told me that he’d had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn’t Bobby, but somebody. Do something to name someone else in ’68”
One of JFK, Jr.’s best friends at the Phillips Academy was Meg Azzoni. In spring, 1977, she and John went to visit Jackie while Caroline was still at Harvard. Meg says: “Jackie told John and I at the ‘break-the-fast’ breakfast, ‘I did not like or trust Lyndon Johnson.’ No one said another word the whole meal in memorial contemplative silence.”
Robert Morrow,
That snide anecdote by LBJ has always bothered me too. What bothers me most about it is that JFK was not slightly cross-eyed (one or both eyes looking toward nose), but slightly wall-eyed (divergent). Like Jim Garrison, coincidentally, though Garrison’s was more obvious. I’ve always wondered if JG had so much sympathy for JFK because of their common, minor affliction of appearance.
I think that passed-down error comes from confusion caused by the old medical term strabismus (Greek for squint), which covers both mis-alignments of the eyes, in and out. Divergent vision tends to go along with ‘bulging eyes,’ hence ‘wall-eyed.’
I started paying attention to wall-eyed vs. cross-eyed in high school. The best English teacher I ever had, and some of the best professors afterward, had an even more pronounced divergent strabismus than JG, yet when an angry student wanted to cut her behind her back, it was, “that cross-eyed old biddy.” But that teacher could see outward, could see extra. I’m convinced she could see around corners.
I’ve observed that the wall-eyed tend to be big readers, like JFK, sometimes to a morbid extent. And that the cross-eyed (though easier to fix with glasses, let alone an operation) tend to eschew written matter. Cross-eyed Sarah Palin is a case in point for that observation.
Dontcha hate it when people draw far-flung general conclusions from minor phenomena?