Robert Kennedy Jr. Versus the C.I.A.
RFK Jr. Publicly Alleges CIA-involvement in His Uncle's (JFK) Assassination
Well, another Kennedy is running for president. This time it is the son of Robert F. Kennedy: President John F. Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General during the Kennedy administration, and who was later assassinated (just as his brother was) when he ran for president in 1968.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential candidacy on April 19, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. Since then he has made several controversial remarks about his uncle’s assassination that have made major headlines in the news. These comments require some examination.
RFK Jr’s major assertion is that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in his uncle’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, and, furthermore, that they have been covering up this fact for the past sixty years.
This is an astounding public statement from a Kennedy family member, and the first of its kind from a member of that family that this writer is aware of.
“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder,” Kennedy said in an appearance on John Catsimatidis’s WABC 770 radio station program on May 7th. “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”
The next night, on Fox News’s Hannity program, RFK Jr. doubled down. Asked by Sean Hannity what evidence exists that the CIA was involved, Kennedy said, “Well, there’s millions of pages of documents—of CIA documents, of transcripts, of recorded conversations from the Cuban embassy in Mexico City...I mean it’s hard to summarize all of the evidence...there are confessions of people directly involved in the plot, who were involved in the planning of the plot, who were peripheral to the plot. There is a sixty-year coverup.”
Kennedy continued. “You know the Warren Commission was run by Allen Dulles, who was the head of the CIA, who my uncle fired. Dulles insinuated himself on to the Warren Commission and essentially ran the Warren Commission and kept this evidence from the Warren Commissioners. Either way, Congress, 10 years later, investigated the crime with much more evidence than the Warren Commission had at its disposal," Kennedy claimed. "Congress [under the second investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979] found that, yeah, it was a plot. It was a conspiracy [and] there were multiple people involved. And most of the people in that investigation believe that it was the CIA that was behind it—because the evidence was overwhelming to them."
Kennedy then went on to tell an anecdote concerning how his father, Robert F. Kennedy, first reacted to the news about his brother’s murder in Dallas. This is a true story as confirmed by journalist David Talbot in his superb biography of RFK named Brothers.
On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Robert F. Kennedy was having lunch by his pool at his mansion named Hickory Hill in McClean, Virginia. The phone by the pool suddenly rang. It was J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, on the other end of the line. “I have news for you. The president’s been shot.” Hoover told a stunned Kennedy. Twenty minutes later he called back. “The president’s dead,” Hoover said, abruptly hanging up.
RFK immediately swung into action, trying to ascertain what had happened to his brother in the streets of Dallas. After speaking on the phone to presidential aid Kenny O'Donnell and various Secret Service agents who had been in JFK’s motorcade and witnessed the assassination, RFK’s immediate thoughts were that the CIA had something to do with the murder of his brother.
Both Kennedy brothers had been deceived and embarrassed by the CIA during the Bay of Pigs invasion early in their administration. The CIA, headed at the time by Allen Dulles, had deliberately lied to John F. Kennedy about the invasion’s prospects for success. Dulles and the CIA leadership figured that when the invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba by CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles began to inevitably fail, Kennedy would be forced to introduce American military forces to rescue the besieged CIA invaders and guarantee the overthrow of Castro. Instead, Kennedy refused to send in American combat forces and the Cuban exiles were subsequently killed and captured by Castro’s forces. Afterward, JFK fired Dulles and the entire top leadership of the Agency, and then appointed Robert to directly oversee any and all CIA operations involving Cuba. Later on RFK would learn to his horror that the CIA had covertly partnered with certain Mafia bosses and Cuban exiles to assassinate Castro. It was this nexus of the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban-exile militants that RFK focused on in the hours after his brother’s slaying in Texas.
After talking to his people in Dallas, RFK called a high-ranking desk officer at CIA headquarters. “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?” Kennedy thundered. It is not yet known how the official replied.
Hours later, after learning that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested in Dallas, RFK called his best friend in the Cuban exile community, Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams. Williams, who had been wounded in the Bay of Pigs invasion, had long served as the unofficial liaison between the Kennedys and the rest of the Cuban-exile leadership, many of whom bitterly blamed JFK directly for the disaster at the Bay of Pigs.
“One of your guys did it,” Kennedy said to Williams, referring to Oswald. This implies that RFK believed that Oswald, far from being a fanatical Marxist-Leninist as portrayed by the press, was actually tied to Williams’ fellow Cuban-exile militants.
On Hannity, RFK Jr. finished his story by relating how he witnessed his father talk to CIA Director John McCone in their yard later that fateful day. “When I came home [from] Sidwell Friends School, my father was walking in the yard with John McCone, and my father was posing the same question to him, ‘Was it our people who did this to my brother?’” he said. “It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother.”
Robert F. Kennedy himself later admitted this to a close friend. He said he took McCone to the backyard for a private conversation. “You know at the time I asked McCone...if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t,” said Kennedy. Both men were devout Catholics, and presumably Kennedy invoked their mutual Catholicism when asking McCone to tell him the truth.
The fact that a member of the Kennedy family, and Robert F. Kennedy’s son no less, publicly alleges that members of the CIA were involved in the murder of his uncle, and that there has been a sixty-year cover-up of this fact, is nothing less than extraordinary.
Former President Donald Trump has also weighed in on CIA involvement in the assassination. It is this writer’s very strong belief that Trump was Tucker Carlson's source for his recent story about the CIA withholding explosive documents that show their complicity in JFK’s murder. See my recent article below for more information:
The United States is in an extraordinary moment where exposing certain facts about events sixty years ago may bring about a long-overdue historical reckoning. The CIA should be very concerned that leading political figures like Trump and RFK Jr. are now openly talking about the Agency's alleged involvement in the assassination of an American president. The CIA would do well to release the hundreds of still-classified documents they are holding related to the Kennedy assassination—in direct violation of the 1992 JFK Records Act, which Congress passed in the wake of public outrage generated by Oliver Stone’s pro-conspiracy movie JFK.
After studying this historical event for over fifteen years and currently working on a book about it, this writer can say unequivocally that RFK Jr’s and Trump’s assertions about JFK’s assassination and the CIA stand on very solid ground.
The American people deserve the whole truth and nothing but the truth—however terrible that truth might be—about the death of their president. Hopefully, this is the moment that the truth is finally revealed.