RFK Jr.'s Historic Moment – Part I
The most prominent Kennedy scion has made the JFK assassination a live issue in 2024
When Sen. Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, he raised nearly quarter of a billion dollars in grassroots donations to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, then dutifully backed out and endorsed the candidate chosen by the party’s super delegates. After many of his supporters reportedly ended up either voting for Donald Trump or not voting at all in November, a reporter asked Sanders how he felt about ex-members of his camp voting to deny Hillary the big win. His answer: “Wrong question.”
If so many of his followers had decided to either stay home or turn to someone whose policies were anathema to his own, he reasoned, they must have been pretty angry about something, right? The media, he suggested, should figure out what ordinary voters are so mad about before blaming him and his populist movement for Clinton’s defeat.
While it’s true that the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan hasn’t raised Bernie-levels of grassroots cash, it’s also true that ordinary voters have less disposable income than they did eight years ago. What RFK Jr. did do, however, was gather over a million signatures nationwide by mobilizing some 100,000 volunteers for access to the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Sanders never had to worry about ballot access in the primaries, whereas RFK Jr. wasn’t just shut out of his party’s nominating process; he also had to qualify the “hard way,” as an independent, finally giving up on the once-upon-a-time party of his father and uncle.
Even then, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) launched a well-financed “lawfare” campaign in the courts to block him from the ballot in the general election. DNC-friendly mainstream media lent the discrimination campaign a helping hand by censoring him from their airwaves as much as they possibly could, while Joe Biden disgraced his presidency by denying Kennedy Secret Service protection until two days after the assassination attempt against Trump, and nearly 15 months after Bobby announced his own candidacy. Now that RFK Jr. has formed a coalition with Trump, it’s fair to say his supporters might have been a bit miffed too.
As someone who has volunteered for Kennedy’s campaign since shortly after he declared his candidacy, I confess to brief shock at the announcement that he was suspending his run, endorsing Trump, and calling on his supporters to refrain from voting for him in “battleground states.” The campaign now tells me those states include my own, Virginia, where “RFK2” (as he’s sometimes known) polls relatively high. But I’m over it.
In 1968, many supporters of the presidential campaign of Bobby’s liberal father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, reportedly transferred their vote to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an advocate of Jim Crow laws, possibly in protest at RFK’s untimely and highly suspicious death. For all his faults, New York real estate mogul Trump is neither the racist Wallace nor his running mate, Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, who — it’s believed by many — was smoking a cigar in the autopsy room during the postmortem on President John F. Kennedy, a man he hated. Trump doesn’t smoke, and Wallace would have turned his nose up hatefully at Trump’s Oval Office photo ops with African-American admirers.
Elites hate populists of any ideological stripe. They hate Trump, and they hated Sanders too. But the neocons in the “Never Trump” crowd – e.g., Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz – despise Trump even more for what they see as his “nativism.” It embarrasses them as members of the urban-liberal intelligentsia. To neocons, Trump’s potential isolationism (he started no wars) is the worst of all Republican sins and frightens them to this day.
Yet even a populist-nativist isn’t necessarily a “threat to democracy.” I think many people sincerely believe Trump is such a threat, and I respect that, but I don’t see it. January 6th was a tragedy, and Bobby Kennedy has described Trump’s actions during that violent, vandalistic riot as “reprehensible.” Personally, I’ve never believed Trump intended or foresaw what happened, even if he bore blame through his recklessness or negligence.
Moreover, three and a half years later, we have to ask who poses the greater threat to basic freedoms, the perpetrators of the so-called “insurrection” or the authorities cracking down in its aftermath? A recent article by Margot Williams at Jefferson Morley’s JFK Facts Substack publication (which I write for), explains the excesses of federal law enforcement, which even now is rounding up people who did no more than enter the Capitol and walk around after a (small) advance mob broke in a door with a battering ram under the eyes of the stock-still police.
Awkward as it is to say, an “insurrection” isn’t per se more “anti-democratic” than what U.S. authorities are doing now. Something that threatens the prevailing order can have plenty of popular democratic legitimacy, even as it frightens civilized people.
RFK Jr. and the JFK Assassination
At a fundamental level, ending American society’s toxic polarization has always been the RFK Jr. campaign’s main theme, at least for some of us. I think the causes of our current social crisis are deep-seated, rooted in history, and find their origin in a watershed event: the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, before I was even born.
After a lot of study, I hold the sincere, eccentric conviction that this isn’t just a historical issue but a vital current one too. Every historic episode is both a cause and an effect, but our problems all lead through November 22, 1963, when the fundamental nature of our government changed. Jeff Morley, a writer I admire who has done invaluable, pioneering research into the assassination, has opined that the assassination isn’t the most important issue facing America today: people have bills to pay, jobs to hold down, kids to put through school. When ordinary folks are thinking day-to-day about making ends meet this week, they aren’t thinking about a tragedy from generations ago. I get that.
But whatever John Q. Citizen is thinking as he goes about his day, I respectfully disagree. I don’t think it necessarily follows that an issue is less important because most Americans don’t think it is, or because it’s not as urgent as a loaf of bread. The “Great Crime” must survive as an issue in current politics until it’s resolved to the satisfaction of serious historians and researchers. Only one campaign is keeping it alive and pledging to address it: the campaign of Donald J. Trump and his new ally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The murder isn’t just a fetish for QAnon conspiracy freaks and assassination hobbyists. It is a seminal event that still affects us. Thanks mostly to RFK Jr.’s political and media influence this election cycle, it is a live issue now too. It may be a long shot to expect Trump and the GOP to seriously do justice to it, but a long shot is better than no shot at all. Maybe a re-elected President Trump would have no power to force disclosure on the 61-year-old atrocity. Maybe — as some believe — all presidents are only cyphers of the national-security state. Cynicism makes some people feel superior. It doesn’t work for me.
Regarding transparency over the still-withheld files related to the assassination of JFK, Trump has already disappointed “bigly.” His acquiescence to “deep state” pressure in postponing full disclosure in 2017 only aroused more public discomfort and mistrust.
Yet if Trump was bad on the JFK files, President Joe Biden proved much worse. Not only did he postpone release of the remaining withheld assassination records indefinitely. He also announced the “final certification” under the JFK Records Act. Congress passed that law unanimously in 1992, preventing President George H. W. Bush from vetoing it, and Biden himself voted for the law as a senator. But instead of honoring the spirit and letter of the law to serve the public interest, Biden actually imposed a new regulatory scheme to govern declassification of the records in place of the JFK Act.
This scheme, known as the “Transparency Plan,” was devised by the CIA-led national security apparatus and essentially guts the 1992 federal statute by burying its timeframes and requirements of periodic review. By executive order, Biden handed all declassification decisions over to the CIA and other unelected agencies in control of relevant records, washing his hands of the process forever.
In doing so, Biden not only grievously abused the public trust. He probably didn’t even see any records before making his fateful decision. Already in cognitive decline, he very likely just signed where he was told to sign and forgot about it. At least Trump claimed he saw something, according to Judge Andrew Napolitano. It’s just that what he saw was so bad, he felt he had to bow to the will of the national security state and keep it under wraps.
Will Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for Biden’s job, make her own position known on JFK? More importantly, does she even have an opinion? Born after the assassination, she’s never expressed any view at all to the best of my knowledge. With any luck, the subject will come up in the upcoming Trump-Harris debate, but how will Harris “get out in front” on the issue when her boss has already tried to bury it? Trump will be able to comment first-hand, but there is no cause for optimism from Harris.
The issue of transparency in the JFK assassination isn’t the exclusive reason I decided to support RFK Jr. for president, but it’s at least tied for first place.
I already knew his position on his uncle’s and father’s assassinations, and that made him a qualitatively different and unprecedented kind of candidate. But on Friday, August 23, confronted with the vision of him on stage with Donald Trump in Arizona, I trembled a bit. Maybe I wanted to feel a “historic moment” so much that I saw one. But I think it was real.
President Trump graciously introduced RFK Jr. as having “lost his father and uncle in service to our country” and vowed to establish an “independent presidential commission” to revisit the JFK assassination and release all the withheld records. I imagined RFK Jr. standing there, waiting to speak, exhilarated at coming as close as anyone in the last 60 years to doing what reporter Dorothy Kilgallen said she was going to do right before her grotesquely sinister and mysterious death in 1965, namely, “bust this case wide open.”
When Bobby took the podium, he never even mentioned the JFK assassination, talking instead, as usual, about public health, endless war, and unwarranted censorship. But I wanted to believe he was consciously hoping President Trump would speak to the morbid, mysterious tragedy of Bobby’s own family for him, and that Bobby — like all of us outside the inner circle of the national security state — still put a top priority on finding out what happened to his uncle and father. Here was a chance at overcoming U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren’s tamping-down of public expectations on the JFK assassination, when he remarked: “We may not know the whole story in our lifetime.”
Whether Trump was only prompted to make this gesture by the recent attempt on his own life seemed immaterial at that moment. Millions of people were watching. It was live. This was a historic moment, whether anyone wanted to believe it or not.
Again, this may seem eccentric, but I believe full disclosure over JFK’s murder continues to be a matter of vital public interest, now more than ever. Without at least an official rejection of the official history as currently disseminated by government and mainstream media, any version of events closer to the truth than what our government peddles to us now will result in sensible people getting branded as “kooks” ad infinitum. We will go on languishing in a social sickness complementary to the physical degradation RFK Jr. passionately wants to reverse, and about which he warns us constantly. As of now, his team-up with Trump is our only hope in Election 2024, whatever the Trump-haters say.
We need the topic of the JFK assassination in the news cycle now, so that it resonates into the next administration and stays in the public memory, whoever wins. In “JFK” (1991), Jim Garrison paraphrases Tennyson: “Do not forget your dying king.” To find out what happened, we have to resist forgetting. We need this pushed to the front of the news.
Kennedy, Trump, and Harris
Whatever the political fallout from the Trump-Kennedy coalition (the liberal MSM commentariat quickly united in its attacks), and whatever the fate of Trump’s White House bid, I have no regrets about supporting the RFK Jr. campaign. My dominant experience in working with other RFK Jr. volunteers has always been, primarily, an absence of hate.
Plenty of fellow campaign workers had voted for Biden in 2020, plenty of others for Trump. But when handing out campaign literature or soliciting signatures for ballot access, we only ever encountered antipathy from obvious Biden supporters. They hissed at us, sometimes spitting inadvertently in the process, their faces red as tomatoes, telling us we were a “disgrace” or “dangerous” or should be “ashamed.”
Trump supporters would sometimes refuse to sign our petition forms, but they were never nasty or unhinged. The “Bidenista” passers-by were manifestly contemptuous, sometimes deranged looking, calling us “nuts” or “crazy” even as they boiled over right in front of us, like apoplectic nutcases on the brink of seizures themselves.
How different from our experience could Bobby Kennedy’s have been at the level of the DNC high grandees? Kennedy and Shanahan both said that the Biden-Harris people had refused even to speak to them, whereas the Trump campaign was at least willing to listen. Under these circumstances, why would anyone blame RFK Jr. for giving up on cooperation with the arrogant Biden-Harris cabal? Nobody passionate about issues of vital public interest, who meets a brick wall from one side and an ajar door from the other, is going to go on bashing his head repeatedly against the bricks and mortar.
If a significant percentage of RFK Jr. supporters are now refusing to back him for endorsing Trump to advance his own agenda of peace, public health, and free speech, I haven’t met any yet. But at the end of the day, faced with the DNC’s well-financed litigation drive to keep him off the ballot, plus censorship by overwhelmingly DNC-friendly mainstream media, Bobby had to have felt forced to choose between doing something or doing nothing at all. He decided to do something, to take a chance on Donald Trump honoring an agreement to prioritize the issues closest to his heart. Even if Trump reneges on his pledge of full disclosure in the JFK assassination, I think Bobby did the right thing.
The drab, uninspiring Democratic Party long ago ceased to be the party of RFK Jr.’s uncle and father. It isn’t the party of FDR, JFK, and RFK. It’s the party of LBJ, a corrupt scoundrel desperate to use the White House for the public adulation he craved. The long-term symptom of LBJ is today’s deeply unpopular DNC, its “woke” elitism failing to resonate with ordinary working Americans, and the ideological primacy of its “transgenderism” mystifyingly inexplicable — even hateful — in light of the infinitesimal percentage of the population that movement represents. Maybe the Republican Party is full of hypocritical religious prigs, which is too bad. But transgender bathrooms for schoolchildren? To quote the late Sen. Bob Dole during his 1996 presidential bid: “Something is wrong in America.”
The censorship Kennedy speaks about is not conspiracy theory. It’s real and palpable, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now confirms publicly that unnamed Biden administration officials (i.e., “deep state” goons) pressured him to censor content related to COVID-19 and other subjects. He now regrets caving, as Trump surely regrets caving in 2017.
Moreover, the “censorship-industrial complex” (as RFK Jr. calls it) traces its roots to November 22, 1963. In interviews, Bobby often recommends James Douglass’s influential book, “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” (2008), which refers to a systemic evil, a “void” permeating official policy and discourse, making it soulless and hollow. Listen to a State Department or Pentagon spokesperson, and you get the drift.
The assassination apparently put a kind of “final seal” on what had built up over the previous decade and a half, as an unaccountable “deep state” acquired more and more power at the expense of elected authorities. That power manifests itself everywhere now, particularly through censorship. Scholarly writers, researchers, and historians of the JFK assassination are systematically marginalized as “conspiracy theorists,” deprived of the big, lucrative book deals and promotions, along with the prestige that comes with them. There is no meaningful difference between “muzzling” these writers and state censorship.
Ironically in the so-called “information age,” the idea that certain things are “unspeakable” is still strong. Six decades after the assassination of JFK, and 56 years after the murder of his faithful brother, a range of issues buried under a mass of mainstream media talking points developed over generations have been exhumed — thanks to RFK Jr.
Possessed of a collective blindness residual of the Cold War, most Americans have ignored the “forever wars,” dietary and environmental toxicity, the waste of our economic resources, the blight of our rotting inner cities, and the decline of our civic consciousness. A drug-addled, unhealthy nation, we’ve received a big wake-up call from RFK Jr., who’s brought issues of vital public interest back into popular discourse.
The issues that Kennedy has led with — (1) war as a money-laundering exercise, (2) chronic illness and disease, and (3) the mainstream-media censorship regime — are the product of the rise of the unelected national security apparatus that secured ultimate power over the political system after passage of the National Security Act of 1947. President Truman signed that bill into law, giving official birth to the Central Intelligence Agency. As soon as President Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sat about writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, essentially lamenting the effects of a law he was responsible for enacting. He suspected the CIA was involved in the murder of his young successor, and that suspicion permeated his op-ed.
The CIA had gradually accumulated more and more power under President Eisenhower, who would warn the public about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell speech in January 1961. But as popular as “Ike” was, he was a complacent head of state, and by the time JFK attempted to resist the power of the unseen force that his predecessor warned about, it was too little, too late. A popular president was murdered most foully, in broad daylight on a downtown U.S. city street.
The title of David Talbot’s book, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” (2015) is no cliché. Our unaccountable “secret government” is the biggest open secret in America today. Only one candidate has talked about any of this in detail, and that is RFK Jr. Thanks to him, we now have a historic opportunity to pursue truth and reconciliation over a dark chapter of our history that remains unresolved, and a real chance to heal this nation.
Next: Part II will address mainstream media’s characterization of RFK Jr. as a “crank” and “conspiracy theorist” and examine the merits of the accusations.
Excellent post. Though, I think you give too much credence to the multi decade refrain of “conspiracy theorist” and “crank” over people who have come to the realization that JFK’s assassination was the work of more than one shooter. I like a lot of people didn’t pay much attention to the assassination and by default accepted the lone gunman theory. But having read and watched a fair amount of media on the subject recently I have a hard time understanding how a rational person can believe the lone shooter theory. I think many people are like me after they look at the material on the assassination. That being said, unfortunately his assassination by the CIA destroyed the soul of our country. Until we publicly acknowledge the truth, our country will continue on our path to ruin.
Gag me with a KGB spoon.