JFK

KATHLEEN KENNEDY-TOWNSEND

(Daughter of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy)

Because I've worked a lot in crime, I've seen it often is the case, that when somebody dies, people want revenge.. And my father could have had that reaction, and it would have changed the life of our family…And it would have changed the life of the country…

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ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

(Son of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy)

During the three years that he was in office, he never sent a combat unit to fight in any foreign war… He was under tremendous pressure by the Joints Chiefs, by everybody who's around him, McGeorge Bundy, to Maxwell Taylor, Lyndon Johnson, everybody, to send combat troops to Vietnam. They said that the Vietnam government would collapse without 250,000 combat troops. He said, “I'm not going to do it.” In fact, he signed a National Security Order. He did end up sending 16,000 advisors, which, incidentally, is fewer people than he sent to the University of Mississippi to get one black man, James Meredith, admitted into that college.

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ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

I also think that it's important to actually investigate the murder of Robert Kennedy. It was a critical turning point in American history the same as John Kennedy's murder. We actually ought to have a real investigation and not a kangaroo court like the Warren commission, which was run by [former CIA director, fired by John Kennedy] Allen Dulles and it should have 

been called the Dulles Commission. Allen Dulles was a suspect or at least a party of interest, at minimum, a party of interest in the murder. He was somebody that did not like my family, did not like my uncle and the fact that he was put in charge of the investigation… we know that he shielded the CIA. That they were not only talking to each other and making sure that the investigation did not look at the CIA, but he was guiding it away from the CIA and lying to the rest of the commissioners. 

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ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

My father's first instinct when his brother died was that the CIA had done it. He immediately made a call to the CIA and asked the desk officer that day…whether your outfit is responsible for this horror… The day that his brother died, he lost all control over the FBI, which was the investigatory arm of the Justice Department…J. Edgar Hoover went right to Johnson…He knew that the assassination involved a conspiracy. He talked to other people like Frank Mankiewicz about it, but he never talked publicly about it. It would have hurt him a lot if he had because it would have marginalized him. It would have made it so that he would be much less effective.

 

 

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

I think this country was at a turning point in 1960 and that turning point was described better than anybody by Eisenhower who said: we are now at a crossroads where we can depart from our values and go down this trail towards a military industrial complex…we're going to lose everything that makes this country a great nation.

 

…I don't think that it's really possible for us to reverse that course unless we go back and find what actually happened in these murders because if our government agencies were involved (and the evidence suggested they were)…then we need to look at those agencies and say “what do we need to do to reclaim our role in the world as an exemplary nation? What do we need to do to reclaim our democracy, our sovereignty, which these agencies and which the military industrial complex has subverted?

 

 

ROBERT KENNEDY, JR.

What happened in 1963 was a coup d'etat against democracy. And if you look at the people who were involved in that coup, some of them and their direct progeny remain embedded in our government. And if you want to give a description of them, they are the military industrial complex. My uncle died trying to keep us out of Vietnam. As soon as my uncle died, the military industrial complex reasserted itself with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and Vietnam became an American war.

 

We've had a number of crossroads in American history where we've had the opportunity to choose a different future, to choose the idealistic future that would make America an exemplary nation, or to choose the dark future that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about. And my father's death, Martin Luther King's death, Malcolm X's death, and my uncle's death, were all markers where we chose a different future for America. And in each case, that future took us further down the road of the military industrial complex.

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JAMES GALBRAITH

(Son of Kennedy Advisor John Kenneth Galbraith)

A man by the name of William Walton, who was the head of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, a Kennedy confidant, a friend of Jacqueline Kennedy's, was scheduled to go to Leningrad just about the time of the assassination. Didn't go. But he did go ten days later, and he carried a message from Bobby Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy to contacts in the Soviet Union explaining their belief that President Kennedy was the victim essentially of a coup d’état and recognizing that this was going to put Soviet-US relations into a deep freeze for a period of time.

 

 

QUESTION: Looking back and drawing on your memories from the time, what would you say the impact of the assassination was on the country or on the world? 

 

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JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, I think it's fair to say it defined the psychology of my generation in a particularly difficult way. In part because of the violence of the act itself, and in part because it set the stage for this long period which is now going on for many decades when people know what they cannot acknowledge. And people who look at it and who think about it in a clear-headed and rational way are treated as though they're speaking something that's taboo…You cannot speak it. You cannot talk about it, or you are excluding yourself from a sphere of, let's call it “leading dialogue” in the United States. A very difficult, very disabling condition for the country as a whole. Lots of countries have ugly traumas in their past. The Germans do…the French had to deal with it. The Russians had to deal with the Soviet period in all of its contradictions. But we refuse to deal with this. And that is something that's going to continue to haunt us. Has haunted us all along. And then there's a larger historical context as well. If Kennedy had not been assassinated, if he had full control of his government in 1964-65, he would have brought the Cold War to an end, assuming that there was a corresponding leadership in the Soviet Union, which, with Nikita Khrushchev, there was. 

 

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STEPHEN SCHLESINGER

(Son of Kennedy Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.)

The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion led to the Cuban missile crisis, because the Russians put in missiles to defend Fidel Castro against U.S. attacks. And that in turn, in my view, led to the assassination of JFK…

 

When Kennedy was killed, I was at Harvard University. I was a junior and I was absolutely shocked, flabbergasted, outraged, didn't know what to do with myself. I remember calling my father and he said, “Please come down to Washington right away.” And I remember flying down that day. And we were just all so stricken that night and we as a family all gathered in our house in Georgetown and we didn't quite know what to do with ourselves. It was just so shocking and so terrible. And terrible in the sense that my father had devoted his life to helping JFK and to see that torn away from him, this feeling that he adored this man so much and had felt that the country was in the hands of a great figure and a great President, to have that absolutely destroyed— it was devastating.

 

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MORT SAHL

(Joke Writer for JFK, Later Deputized Investigator for D.A. Jim Garrison)

In other words, murder became legal that day… When I went to see [Senator George] McGovern, I said, "It's a set-up. The President was executed." And he said to me, "Well, you know, Mort, Kennedy wasn't that good a President." And I said, "Is that punishable by death?

 

 

OLIVER STONE

(Filmmaker, JFK)

He could not be allowed to live. I'm sure that if he'd gotten as far as the underpass, there was somebody else on the other side of the underpass who would have taken care of him.

 

 

ROGER STONE

(Aide to Former President Richard Nixon)

After Nixon had a couple cocktails, he would get positively loquacious. I summoned up courage to ask him: “Mr. President, who really killed Kennedy?" And he sat there, and he looked in his martini for a while, and he said, "Well, the Warren Commission report is the biggest goddamn hoax in American history.

 

And I said, "Yeah, but who really killed Kennedy?" He again stared for a moment into his drink, and he said, "It was Dallas." And he visibly shivered. And I said, "I don't think I understand?" He said, "Let me put it to you this way. Lyndon and I both wanted to be President, but I wasn't willing to kill for it.

 

 

 

MALCOLM X

 

 

DR. ILYASAH SHABAZZ

(Daughter of Malcolm X)

My mother lived through her home being firebombed. A firebomb thrown in the nursery where her baby slept. She witnessed, while she was pregnant with her twins and had four babies, she witnessed this horrific assassination of her husband, right? She was very clear that it wasn’t the Nation of Islam that killed her husband.  That there were organizations that orchestrated his assassination, to make it look as though, “Oh, Malcolm. He got killed by his own people because he was advocating all this violence... 

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RODNELL COLLINS

(Nephew of Malcolm X)

Malcolm’s plan for the Vietnam vets, was to get them organized to go and fight for liberation in African nations, those that were struggling for independence. That was his plan. To fight with the African freedom fighters.

 

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QUESTION: Do you think that The FBI and The CIA knew about that plan?

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RODNELL COLLINS: Oh, they knew about that plan because Congress was against it. Congress had already been looking at previous situations like that, when Black people went over to fight in Ethiopia, for their independence. They didn’t want that to happen again.

 

PROFESSOR JAMES SMALL

(Former Imam, Mosque No. 7, Head of Secutiry for Malcolm X's Sister)

Ella felt that Malcolm was killed by the government of The United States. That’s what we in The OAAU were told. We felt that J. Edgar Hoover was the person that made the calls, to pull the trigger. She felt that The CIA wanted him dead, rather than wanting him to leave this country for sanctuary in another country or ending up in Africa.

 

 

MAXWELL STANFORD, JR. 

(Malcolm X Aide)

Within 15 days of his assassination, [just after the firebombing of his house] we meet in the evening, at Twenty-Two West Restaurant. I wanted to cry. He was physically shaken.  He said he wanted me to leave the country. I said I don’t have any money. He had tears in his eyes for me. And I had tears in my eyes for him.  It was happening at a level that we couldn’t control. When the government does something… and it was verified through my class. One of the guys who was not old enough to be part of the assassination but joined the NOI afterwards, became one of the hitmen inside security. He said the FBI had given the money for the assassination. There were several hit teams.

He said he was awakened one night, at the time his father was killed. In a dream he saw himself assassinated.  And I said, can’t you do anything about it? And he said, "It's fixed!"

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MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

 

BERNICE KING

(Daughter of Dr. King)

We were kind of taught that our father, because of the way he lived his teachings, his way of really exposing some things in the nation, that he was gonna lose his life this way. 

 

In the early 80’s is when I started wondering without anything to pinpoint…That’s when it really became, for me, a question mark and so, from that time on, I just knew that the

story that’s been told is not the real story.

 

As you study Daddy, as you look at history, you know there were a lot of forces involved. That it was a conspiracy. We’re not crazy. 

 

For me, that’s where I land. That there were a lot of entities and people, not just external that were involved in my father’s assassination. 

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ANDREW YOUNG

(Advisor to Dr. King)

I would not say that James Earl Ray was the lone assassin to Martin Luther King.

 

I think it was Hoover. I don’t think it was an FBI decision of the leadership deciding. I think Hoover was threatened by the fact that we could shut down the town and there was nothing he could do about it.

 

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MARTIN LUTHER KING III

(Son of Dr. King)

He had in his mind subconsciously that things that he was doing, at some point were going to cause his life to be taken.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. was not killed because he was trying to get people to sit at a lunch counter. He was talking about restructuring wealth and resources in the nation. Economics. That’s what got him killed.

 

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ISAAC FARRIS

(Nephew of Dr. King)

By 1970 the question was heavy on our hearts of how this happened and who was responsible. We never, from day one, believed that James Earl Ray alone killed my uncle M.L.

 

 

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ROBERT F. KENNEDY

 

 

 ROBERT F.KENNEDY, JR.

(Son of Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy) 

If you are somebody, who was involved in his brother's assassination, you now have a figure who is not just a political figure, a man running for president, but this is the man who knows more about federal investigations than any living man in the country at that time. He had run the racketeering committee, he had run the biggest committees in Congress and he had been the Mueller of his time. He knew more than anybody how to do a national investigation. He also knew how these agencies worked. They couldn't hide anything from him. He knew what was happening at the agencies, at the FBI and the CIA, and he would not have been bamboozled by them. So anybody— if they were at the agencies, or anywhere else— in the Mafia, which he had already investigated—it would be a frightening prospect that Robert Kennedy would be elected President.

 

ROBERT F.KENNEDY, JR.

Sirhan did not kill my dad. Sirhan fired two shots at my dad. One of them hit Paul Schrade and the other one hit the door jamb behind my father, where it was later extracted by police…Sirhan was always about five feet in front of my father. He never got behind my father, but my father according to Thomas Noguchi's autopsy, was shot four times from behind. Each one of those was a contact shot, meaning it left a carbon tattoo in his flesh, which means that the barrel of the gun could have been no more than one inch from his body. Sirhan never got that close to my father. The audio tapes that night show that there were indications there were 13 shots fired. Sirhan had only had eight chambers in his gone, and he never had a chance to reload.

 

 

PAUL SCHRADE

(Labor Advisor to Robert F. Kennedy, Shot at the Same Moment)

Generally, the media has not done a good job with this. There are some good documentaries, there are some good articles, there are some really good books by, mostly, scholars, but the general media has not been - they don't really penetrate the case, they don't go to the facts of the case. The facts are all out there, in the California State Archives. Or in some of the books that have been written, but... 

 

But, generally, the media - ABC, NBC, CBS, television media, newspapers, magazines, they went along with the story.

 

 

ADAM WALINSKY

(Speechwriter to Robert F. Kennedy)

I think there is no question that the Vietnam War and its aftermath were made possible by the assassination of President Kennedy. I also think and believe that that war and its effects are still with us. That they live on in the whole secret government. The government that conducts war without telling us. A government that spies on every word that we say to each other. That, in fact, doesn't even bother to conceal those facts anymore because it begins to look like they're more interested in proving to us that we are helpless than in maintaining a pretense that we are free.