You know how the conventional wisdom about gay marriage went from icky controversy to cuddly wisdom over the last four years?
You know how cannabis legalization went from stoner madness to sensible libertarianism in the past eighteen months?
Something like that is about to happen with the JFK assassination story. The elite media Washington consensus about the JFK story is evolving from the fringe to the mainstream, propelled by this straightforward report from the Dallas Morning News.
Robert F. Kennedy suspected conspiracy in his brother’s assassination, son says | The Scoop Blog.
USA Today jumped on the story and others can’t be far behind.
RFK’s conspiratorial conviction is news in those news organizations whose senior editors have spent decades averting their eyes from the Dallas tragedy. It is not news to serious journalists and scholars interested in the JFK story.
Journalist David Talbot fleshed out RFK’s private views in extensive detail in his 2007 book “Brothers.” As early as 1999, presidential historian Timothy Naftali documented that Bobby and Jackie Kennedy had suspected a domestic conspiracy within a week of JFK’s death. But complacent editors, like Bill Keller of the New York Times, have habitually deleted such solid JFK research from their memory banks with the lofty certainty that only pathetic “conspiracy theorists” cared about such things.
A Kennedy family member–the closest thing America has to royalty–cannot be treated with such disdain. RFK Jr., persuaded by Talbot’s solid research, is now willing to talk about what his father really thought. His brave remarks are going to change the discussion of JFK’s assassination in 2013.
From now on, the reflexive sneer of the influential minority who would prefer not to think about troubling JFK facts (such as CIA malfeasance in the handling of Oswald evidence) will be harder to sustain. Since I doubt very much that a pro-Kennedy, anti-conspiracy theorist like Chris Matthews will impugn a Kennedy as a deluded “conspiracy theorist,” the causes of JFK’s death can now be discussed, not in the language of psychological deformity, but with the vocabulary of historical candor.
It is a welcome and overdue development.
Because Oswald was killed the Kennedy’s were like everyone else, just guessing.
It is about time for the Kennedy family to take their heads out of the sand and the muzzles off their mouths about what the family *really* privately thought about the JFK assassination. And it was not the mafia who murdered JFK.
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.
On June 3, 1968, Robert Kennedy said “I now fully realize that only the powers of the presidency will reveal the secrets of my brother’s death.” RFK was assassinated 3 days later on June 6, 1968 after winning the California Democratic primary.
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”
JACKIE KENNEDY DID NOT LIKE OR TRUST LYNDON JOHNSON
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.”