nature of Oswald’s pro-Castro activities. It has been established that, on at least one occasion in 1963, he offered his services for clandestine paramilitary actions against the Castro regime, though, as has been suggested, he may have merely been posing as an anti-Castro activist.
That the evidence points to the possibility that Oswald was also associated in 1963 with David Ferrie, the Marcello operative who was openly and actively anti-Castro, is troubling, too. Finally, the only Cuba-related activities that have ever been established at 544 Camp Street, New Orleans, the address of an office building that Oswald stamped on some of his Fair Play for Cuba Committee handouts, were virulently anti-Castro in nature.
Thus, the committee was unable to resolve its doubts about Lee Harvey Oswald. While the search for additional information in order to reach an understanding of Oswald’s actions has continued for 15 years, and while the committee developed significant new details about his possible organized crime associations, particularly in New Orleans, the President’s assassin himself remains not fully understood. The committee developed new information about Oswald and Ruby, thus altering previous perceptions, but the assassin and the man who murdered him still appear against a backdrop of unexplained, or at least not fully explained, occurrences, associations and motivations.
The scientific evidence available to the committee indicated that it is probable that more than one person was involved in the President’s murder. That fact compels acceptance. And it demands re-examination of all that was thought to be true in the past. Further, the committee’s investigation of Oswald and Ruby showed a variety of relationships that may have matured into an assassination conspiracy. Neither Oswald nor Ruby turned out to be “loners,” as they had been painted in the 1964 investigation. Nevertheless, the committee frankly acknowledged that it was unable firmly to identify the other gunman or the nature and extent of the conspiracy.
Robert F. Kennedy
The existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus, I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the hopes of liberal America turned to his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy. The third of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s sons, Bobby Kennedy had much of JFK’s white-toothed handsomeness and charisma and, if anything, was more of a political idealist. His favourite quote was: “Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I dream of things that never were and say, Why not?”
In the end it was politics that got Bobby Kennedy assassinated.
After education at Harvard and Virginia University Law School, Bobby Kennedy was called to the Massachusetts bar in 1951, but his powerful and ambitious father pulled strings that ensured he was lifted almost immediately to higher things. A stint in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department under Senator Joe McCarthy was followed by the very high-profile role of chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. Top of Kennedy’s hit list was Jimmy Hoffa, head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the truckers union, America’s largest and richest labour organization. Hoffa was, Kennedy considered, the chief malefactor in a nationwide “conspiracy of evil”; he had tied the truckers in to the Mob and used the union’s pension fund as his private bank account. Hoffa, the belligerent poor boy made good, and Kennedy, the Harvard-educated rich boy, hated each other. An obsessive rivalry ensued; when Hoffa was waiting at a federal court to be charged with bribery and conspiracy, he delighted in informing Kennedy that “I can do fifty one-handed push-ups. How many can you do?” RFK went home immediately and practised until he could do a hundred.
A lull in the Kennedy—Hoffa battle occurred when RFK became campaign manager for his brother John’s successful run at the White House in 1960. RFK’s reward was the post of Attorney General in the new administration, where he immediately made an enemy of FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover wanted the FBI to focus exclusively on the old enemy, the Communists; Kennedy wanted to use the Bureau to smash gangland, and Hoffa in particular. Hoover and RFK developed a mutual detestation. “A psycho,” said Kennedy of Hoover. “That sneaky little son of a bitch,” said Hoover of Kennedy. Their opinions were well known to each other, because Hoover phone-tapped Kennedy, and vice versa. To get at RFK, Hoover at some point in the early 1960s gave Hoffa the files he had created on Kennedy’s indiscriminate adulterous affairs. The stratagem did no good, and Hoffa went to the penitentiary anyway. In 1967 Hoffa told an informant that he had a contract out on RFK.
The Attorney General continued to make enemies. He energetically intervened in civil liberties, and supported desegregation in the South, thus alienating white Dixie (and the ultra-racist Hoover); he banished CIA officer William Harvey after Harvey sent illegal teams to Cuba to assassinate Castro; he unsuccessfully attempted to deport Mafia boss Carlos Marcello; he angered the military-industrial complex by proposing withdrawal from the Vietnam War; he dismayed Southern California ranchers by supporting the rights of migrant workers to the extent that the ranchers, according to the FBI, put a $500,000 contract on RFK’s head.
After John F. Kennedy’s assassination at Dallas, the younger Kennedy headed for the top spot in US politics. In 1968 RFK formally announced that he was standing as a Democratic presidential candidate in 1968. Just after midnight on 4 June that year, after victory in the California primary, Kennedy was shot as he walked through the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
It seemed an open and shut case. Dozens of witnesses saw the assailant fire. Sirhan Sirhan was apprehended with the smoking gun in his hand. Evidence presented at Sirhan’s trial showed him to be a misfit loner who had written in a notebook found by the LAPD: “My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming the more
But there were holes—literally—in the prosecution case. In his exhaustive analysis of RFK’s murder,
For almost 20 years the LAPD sat on its RFK assassination documents, and when Melanson and others were finally allowed to view the records many were found to have been lost, crudely censored or destroyed by the LAPD. Among the evidence destroyed were 2,400 photographs, including a roll of film taken of the actual shooting, 3,000 transcripts of interviews, and the door frame from the kitchen in which a number of bullets had lodged.
If there was another gun, who fired it? Aside from the mysterious woman in the polka-dot dress, the light of historical inquiry has begun to shine brighter and brighter on Thane Cesar, the Ace security guard who stood directly behind RFK in the Ambassador kitchen. Several bystanders testified that Cesar pulled a gun during the shooting. Don Schulman, an eyewitness and a journalist for KNXT-TV, reported live: “The security guard… hit Kennedy all three times.” Despite being mortally wounded, RFK turned around and grabbed at Cesar and pulled his bow tie off. It can be seen clearly on the ground next to the stricken RFK in photographs. Was Kennedy’s lunge at Cesar an attempt to get to grips with his assailant? Cesar, a vociferous right-winger, lied and contradicted himself in his testimonies to the police. He declared that he had sold his own.22 handgun before 4 June, but it was subsequently proved that he had sold it afterwards. Nevertheless, the LAPD refused to investigate Cesar.
Assuming a second gun killed RFK, the role of Sirhan Sirhan requires explanation—after all, Sirhan declared
