RFK Jr. on the murder of his uncle

Alex Jones' outrageous recent behavior on the Piers Morgan show has prompted me to make a belated New Year's resolution: I shall do everything I can to make sure people differentiate legitimate research into JFK's assassination from the nonsense promulgated by conspira-freaks like Jones. One of the reasons why I insist that "the JFK thing" is not just another paranoid theory is the fact that quite a few important figures have always doubted the findings of the Warren Commission. The doubters have included the accused assassin's widow, Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, Lyndon Johnson (who convened the Commission), Commission member Richard Russell...

...and the victim's brother, Robert F. Kennedy.

Anyone who doubts that last point should consult this recent interview with RFK Jr.:

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.

Not mentioned in this story is one key fact: According to RFK campaign aide Richard Lubic, RFK had privately told his supporters "Subject to me getting elected, I would like to reopen the Warren Commission."

By the way: National Geographic is making a telefilm out of Bill O'Reilly's awful book Killing Kennedy, reviewed in a previous post. Among its many other flaws, this book disingenuously ignores all of the research materials (documents, interviews and so forth) which have come out since 1964. I don't support any call to stop this production -- why give Bill O'Reilly an excuse to claim the "matyrella" position? -- but I do think there should be time allotted for the presentation of an alternative view.