RFK Jr. and the Kennedy Legacy: Mockingbird Lies and Distortions

Originally published on “I Protest” by Donald Jeffries

I’ve described the impact that the JFK assassination had on me, as a seven-year-old child. My Catholic family was in mourning, as reruns of Superman, Popeye, The Little Rascals and the Three Stooges were preempted for the nonstop coverage of Kennedy lying in state and then the funeral, with a riderless horse leading the procession.

There was a somber mood over the country, and within my family’s small brick rambler. Like most Catholics, my parents were enthralled with the handsome and well-spoken John F. Kennedy, the youngest president ever elected, and the first one who shared our religion. I was as impressionable as any other kid that age, so I was enthralled with him, too. He was the first president I remember, and that dignified and articulate persona set the template for what I imagined the leader of our country was supposed to be like. Going from that to the crude and bumbling Lyndon Johnson was a culture shock that I think contributed to a national loss of confidence.

We were driving home from Sunday mass when we heard on the radio that suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot. Even as a barely intellectually formed second grader, I realized that Jack Ruby must have shot Oswald to stop him from talking. I actually remember pontificating about this to adult relatives at the next big family gathering. No one corrected me. My father, and every other family member who discussed the subject, never accepted the official explanation for a minute. My father hated Johnson as much as he loved Kennedy, so the vice president was his chief suspect. He used to say that, during the Kennedy inaugural, Sam Rayburn told his pal LBJ, “It should have been the other way around,” in other words, that JFK had been vice president.

Now that little anecdote about Rayburn is in none of the Kennedy books. At least the ones I’ve read, and I’ve read a whole bunch of them. My father used to claim dubious knowledge about many things, but as a small child you just accept it as true. At any rate, I never once thought of Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin of JFK. My interest in the Kennedys was reignited with a passion when JFK’s brother Bobby ran for president in 1968. I followed all the primaries, and first learned the nuances of our political process as an eleven year old. I had to go to bed on the night of the California primary, but still remember shouting out, “Dad, did Bobby Kennedy win the primary” as soon as I woke up in the morning. “Yes, but he was shot,” my father replied.

We watched coverage of the shooting at school. You knew it was serious when they wheeled in a television set to every classroom. The only other time I remember them doing that was for a World Series game the previous year. Some kids were joking about RFK being shot; clearly they didn’t like him. Well, obviously, their families didn’t like him. Surely they weren’t as sophisticated as I was already, keeping score of the delegate count. There were rumors that some students, perhaps even teachers, had cheered in Texas, when news of JFK being shot was reported. I realized even then just how much emotion this family stirred up in people.

I recall hearing Frank Mankiewicz announcing that Bobby Kennedy had died, as I was playing by myself in our unfinished basement. I don’t think I cried when JFK died, but I certainly did cry for RFK. I watched the coverage of another Kennedy death on television. Andy Williams, one of RFK’s countless celebrity friends, singing a heartfelt rendition of Battle Hymn of the Republic. The moving eulogy delivered by the sole remaining brother, Senator Edward Kennedy. “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were, and say why not?” Teddy’s greatest speech. Then the long train procession, with the Little League players standing with their caps across their chests. People of all kinds weeping and waving sadly.

For some reason, my father didn’t like RFK very much, but after watching that train procession, he declared that there was no doubt that he would have been elected president. I didn’t pay much attention to the political race in 1972. My father liked Ed Muskie, so I did. But then he was caught crying over some of Nixon’s supposed dirty tricks, and that was that. Things worked like that in America 1.0. There was always the hope that Teddy Kennedy would run, but he always declined, citing his family. I was rooting for him, because he was a Kennedy. Even after Chappaquiddick.

By 1975, I’d started on the path that has led me down so many rabbit holes. My mother bought me a copy of the new book They’ve Killed the President! by Robert Sam Anson, and then Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane. I subsequently joined Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry, where I headed the local Falls Church, Virginia chapter. We watched the Zapruder film a lot. I remember a group of us viewing it for the first time in someone’s attic. I organized a “Who Killed JFK?” presentation at my county’s central library. It was cancelled by a freakish April snow storm. When we rescheduled, it was Lane’s top aide Joe Secchio, not him, who spoke. I don’t know what happened to Secchio (not even sure of the spelling). I’ve tried to look him up without success.

We also lobbied Congress. Or tried to. No member of Congress was going to talk to some long haired teenager spouting off about the government killing Kennedy. We saw a few aides, who were predictably dismissive. Local media had no interest. I was beginning to understand that these reporters weren’t crusaders for truth, but shills for the state. We were lobbying for a congressional investigation, and the HSCA did eventually form. But it was a gigantic disappointment. I grew very disillusioned with the subject, although I continued to read new information, like David Lifton’s best seller Best Evidence. I also subscribed to Penn Jones’ The Continuing Inquiry.

Hatred of the Kennedys goes back to old Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of this huge clan. He had all the right enemies; FDR, Churchill, Truman, etc. Old Joe had been an opponent of WWI, and he joined the America First movement to oppose our entrance into WWII as well. Joe had presidential aspirations himself, and there were rumors he was going to challenge FDR in 1940. But after a mysterious closed door meeting with FDR, Joe suddenly announced he was supporting our second worst president once again. We’ll never know what was really discussed behind those closed doors. Old Joe thus began to channel his presidential aspirations into his eldest son.

By the time I wrote Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, I was able to assess the history of the Kennedys in what I hope was a reasonable manner. I compiled the Kennedy Body Count for the book, and it is impressive. Unlike the Clinton Body Count, Bush Body Count, etc., the bodies associated with the Kennedys were Kennedys, not their enemies or whistleblowers who were a threat to them. I started with Joseph Kennedy, Jr., the star of the family, apple of his father’s eye, and the man who would unquestionably have been the first Catholic president, instead of his younger brother Jack.

Joe, Jr. died in a suspicious plane crash near the end of WWII. It seemed to be a nonsensical mission, since the Nazis had long abandoned the site. I go into some of the questionable details in the book, and will have more about it in the upcoming Hidden History: American Memory Hole. Old Joe never recovered from Joe, Jr’s, death, and nearly got into a fight with Harry Truman in the White House after calling FDR “that crippled son of a bitch” and blaming him for his son’s death. They say he would walk the beach alone and stare out into the water. To the end of his life, if Joe Jr.’s name was mentioned, the old man would burst into tears.

But it wasn’t enough that Old Joe lost his eldest son in a plane crash. He lost his eldest daughter, Kathleen “Kick,” in a separate plane crash. Think of the odds of that. RFK, Jr. was the first to reveal the fact that his grandfather served on a commission during the 1950s, which scrutinized the out-of-control CIA. Old Joe Kennedy was the most outspoken member, and recommended scaling back their powers considerably, limiting them exclusively to foreign intelligence gathering. One can imagine how even more unpopular this made Kennedy in the corridors of power. As RFK, Jr. has pointed out, the Agency hated the Kennedys before JFK attained the White House.

President Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell, and Richard Bissell, the top three officials in the CIA, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs. He also threatened to smash the CIA into a “thousand pieces” behind the scenes. As we all know, he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. RFK was shot on June 5, 1968, and died a day later. So Old Joe Kennedy had endured the loss of four of his children by unnatural means. Actually, three of his children were in separate plane crashes. Teddy survived his in 1964. The old man unfortunately suffered a stroke early in JFK’s presidency, making him a prisoner in his own body for the remainder of his life.

I am one of the few researchers to delve into what really happened on Chappaquiddick Island on July 19, 1969. You can find the details in Hidden History, and more in the next volume of what is becoming a series. But suffice to say that I think Chappaquiddick was Teddy’s political assassination, in terms of his possibility of ever being president. I don’t think he was in the car when it went off the bridge. When Teddy inexplicably decided to challenge Jimmy Carter in 1980, the time had passed. It was an anticlimactic event. The media performed as expected, suddenly drudging up Chappaquiddick, a subject they had studiously avoided.

Teddy felt the impact of the “new normal” in terms of mainstream coverage of the Kennedys. The emergence of Judith Campbell Exner onto the stage, conveniently at a moment when interest in the JFK assassination was at a peak, and polls showed very few Americans trusted the official story, shattered the Camelot myth. Exner was entirely un-credible- I go over the truth about her in Hidden History. She didn’t “prove” anything. But the same kept press that refused to listen to teenagers like me, regarding the massive evidence for conspiracy in the JFK assassination, accepted her ludicrous tales without any skepticism.

Wearing her ridiculous oversized sunglasses, Exner wove a tale whereby JFK, the only president who attempted to do anything to reign in the Mafia, had actually been co-opted by them. Kennedy was a reckless womanizer, cheating not only with Marilyn Monroe and most other big-name actresses of the day, but also bedding gangster molls. All while his aggressive younger brother, Attorney General was rounding up mobsters and flying them out of the country. The new depiction of JFK was one of a serial adulterer, who also somehow was always deadly sick as well. Too sick to have been allowed to be president. A dying, sickly sexual stud. The same media never complained about FDR, who hid his paralysis from the public.

And so the hounds were released on the Kennedys. They were invariably described as “reckless.” They had a death wish, including JFK, who presumably wanted to be assassinated. And wouldn’t have had anyone do it but good old Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s a lone assassin thing, you wouldn’t understand. Every other high-profile Democratic Party politician of the past several decades gets treated with kid gloves by the court historians. I tabulated some of FDR’s Body Count in Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963. I’ll have more of his high crimes in the upcoming book. They seem cool with Truman dropping the bomb. And LBJ gets much better press than JFK. His Body Count may very well include his own sister.

Until RFK, Jr., I think I was the only one writing and talking about the lies smearing the Kennedys, going back to old Joe. There is no evidence that he was a “bootlegger.” He was an exemplary father, and was trying to help his “slow” daughter Rosemary with what he was told was a new, miracle medical procedure, something only available to those of his wealth, which would “cure” her. What rich father wouldn’t have tried to make his daughter “normal?” Another routinely accepted myth is that Old Joe called in some “favors” with the Mafia to steal Illinois (and the 1960 election) from Nixon. You know how much they hate the Kennedys, when they’re painting one of their favorite villains, Tricky Dick, as the victim here.

Without exception, all of these scurrilous allegations against the Kennedys, going back to the “moonshine” nonsense of the family patriarch, come from either CIA or Mafia sources. Both of which, of course, had good reason to hate the family. No one else had ever talked about abolishing the CIA, as President Kennedy was doing in private, and no one has since. The Kennedys were the last politicians to go after organized crime. Yet, thanks to a monstrous disinformation campaign, most of the muddled public believes they were affiliated with the mob themselves. Didn’t JFK party with Frank Sinatra?

In Hidden History, I quoted all the counterculture figures who hated the Kennedys. Today’s Left really despises them, and lies about their legacy. Not just their deaths, which are attributed to lone nuts. Who had to kill them, what with them being so reckless and all. Noam Chomsky thinks JFK’s assassination was historically irrelevant. To hell with National Security Action Memorandum 263, which detailed JFK’s withdrawal plans from Vietnam. He would have done the same thing that LBJ did. Chris Hedges, whom my friend John Barbour has compared me to, has a similar conventional, negative view of the Kennedys. Nobody seems to like them now.

With all due modesty, I conducted the first in depth investigation of the death of JFK, Jr., in Hidden History. And again, I’ll have much more in the upcoming book. JFK, Jr. was assassinated. Period. He wasn’t “reckless.” The weather was fine. I describe the reactions to his death in Hidden History. They were shameful. No more romantic, Camelot stuff for this gang. If they keep dying unnaturally, it’s because they have a death wish. They’re perpetually reckless. They pretty much deserve what they get. They should all be banned from public office. The last thing we need is another Kennedy in the White House.

Which brings us to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It’s hard to imagine a more attractive candidate. Like his father and his uncle, RFK, Jr. is shockingly well-read, a real student of history. He is an intellectual giant compared to all of the other candidates. His lone drawback is his voice, but thanks to recent surgery, that seems to be better as well. He is the kind of action oriented guy that used to describe the Kennedys, before they all became reckless, womanizing, mobster fanboys. RFK, Jr. has been in the center of the action all his life, overcoming a heroin addiction to become a noted environmental lawyer who served 30 days in a Puerto Rican prison for his beliefs.

I never dreamed that I’d hear any politician, let alone a member of the Kennedy family, talk openly about the government killing JFK and RFK. RFK, Jr. is well versed on these cases, having obviously taken the time to research them, instead of just regurgitating the inane talking points of the court historians and the state controlled media. Jacqueline Kennedy set the tone for the entire family, during the funeral which she wanted to rival Lincoln’s. Her policy was basically “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The subject simply wasn’t raised with her. Her daughter, Caroline carried this to truly extreme lengths. She still looks offended if anyone mentions the assassination which took place sixty years ago.

Her brother was an entirely different matter. As I discovered, in private he was renowned for reading the same books I did, and openly talking about the conspiracy to kill his father. His high school girlfriend felt he was on a “quest” to expose the truth about the assassination. This may have led to the fracturing of his relationship with Caroline, as was hinted at in RFK, Jr.’s diaries, which were leaked to The New York Post by his second wife shortly before she was found hanged in a barn, and published the following year, in 2013. Until RFK, Jr. began speaking out publicly about the assassinations, John Jr. was the only family member who seemed interested.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is heir to an unprecedented historical legacy. He has had to endure not only the murder of his father and alleged suicide of his wife, but the unnatural deaths of two of his brothers. David Kennedy was very close to his father and never got over his death. His overdose was considered suspicious, at least by The Continuing Inquiry. Did Michael Kennedy actually die while playing football on a ski slope? Well, the Kennedys are reckless. Certainly sounds like them. It was an historically reckless week on the ski slopes, from December 1997 to January 5, 1998. Former rock star turned congressman Sonny Bono died only days after Kennedy. He also ran into a tree, after asking lots of questions about Waco and other Clinton scandals. Just a fluky week for rich people on their skis.

When Old Joe entrusted his daughter’s life to the Medical Industrial Complex, they failed him miserably. And he, not they, shouldered the blame. Good people actually think he meant to turn his adult daughter into a figurative toddler. Now, his grandson runs for president, as the first politician I know of who is taking on a far more corrupt Medical Industrial Complex. RFK, Jr. also has to contend with pretty much his entire family opposing his candidacy. I don’t know, has that ever happened before- a high-profile politician’s close family members openly speaking out against him? At least his actress wife is standing behind him, but it’s not certain she agrees with him.

I’ve been watching RFK, Jr.’s speeches and interviews. He is magnificently well-informed. He has written several books, and would be the most literate president since his uncle. He has been attacked viciously throughout our “free” and “competitive” press. He now is saddled with the moniker “anti-vaxxer” in the same vein as David Koresh wore the “cult leader” descriptor, and Manuel Noriega was “Panamanian Strongman.” Kennedy isn’t “against vaccines.” But he is asking a lot of the right questions. Questions no one else in public life is asking. And then there’s the fact that he looks like the most muscular 69-year-old in history. Shouldn’t that count for something? At the very least, it’s inspirational.

RFK, Jr. recently gave a wonderful speech extolling the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s “Peace” speech at American University. That was probably the most remarkable speech ever given by an American president. Bobby, Jr. seems to be in favor of peace as well. Which is a controversial position to take today, in America 2.0. His own party, the Democrats, certainly seem to resent the very word “peace.” They want war with Russia- the same Russia that JFK attempted to humanize in his speech six decades ago- and they want it now. RFK, Jr. has even made the right comments about our wide-open southern border. Again, a position that is anathema in today’s Democratic Party. They want no restrictions on immigration, as long as it’s nonwhite.

Yes, I was troubled by RFK, Jr.’s seeming capitulation to the Israeli lobby, when he took down those Rogers Waters’ tweets and wound up waving an Israeli flag in a parade. But no one’s perfect. Least of all, our perpetually detestable presidential candidates. I’m probably being naive again, but I’m starting to fall for him. I see him, and I picture his father, with the tousled hair, surrounded by all those kids and dogs. I remember the tears this child shed for him. They probably don’t count the votes. They would never let another Kennedy, especially this Kennedy, back in the White House. If he does somehow win, that means he wasn’t sincere. Let me have my moment. I’ve watched a lot of Frank Capra films. At the very least, this is entertaining.

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Donald Jeffries is the author of the cult classic novel “The Unreals,” and the best-sellers “Hidden History,” “Survival of the Richest,” “Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963” “Bullyocracy,” and “On Borrowed Fame.”

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