Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has now said what many Americans have suspected and some historians have at times hinted: his father Robert F. Kennedy had serious doubts about whether President John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman — and suspected the possible involvement of organized crime. The Daily Mail reports:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is convinced that a lone gunman wasn’t solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a ‘shoddy piece of craftsmanship.’
Kennedy and his sister, Rory, spoke about their family Friday night while being interviewed in front of an audience by Charlie Rose at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. The event comes as a year of observances begins for the 50th anniversary of the president’s death.
Their uncle was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade through Dallas.
Five years later, their father was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel while celebrating his win in the California Democratic presidential primary.
And here are the comments that’ll create the real buzz:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his father spent a year trying to come to grips with his brother’s death, reading the work of Greek philosophers, Catholic scholars, Henry David Thoreau, poets and others ‘trying to figure out kind of the existential implications of why a just God would allow injustice to happen of the magnitude he was seeing.’
He said his father thought the Warren Commission, which concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president, was a ‘shoddy piece of craftsmanship.’
He said that he, too, questioned the report.
‘The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman,’ he said, but he didn’t say what he believed may have happened.
Rose asked if he believed his father, the U.S. attorney general at the time of his brother’s death, felt ‘some sense of guilt because he thought there might have been a link between his very aggressive efforts against organized crime.’
Kennedy replied: ‘I think that’s true. He talked about that. He publicly supported the Warren Commission report but privately he was dismissive of it.’
He said his father had investigators do research into the assassination and found that phone records of Oswald and nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days after the president’s assassination, ‘were like an inventory’ of mafia leaders the government had been investigating.
He said his father, later elected U.S. senator in New York, was ‘fairly convinced’ that others were involved.
It’s unlikely the JFK assassination will ever be “solved” to everyone’s satisfaction, but RFK, Jr’s comments add to the steady drip-drip-drip that undercuts the certainty about the Warren Commission report that LBJ and others had hoped would emerge and lay the issue to rest.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.