General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: JFK Conference: David Talbot named Allen Dulles as 'the Chairman of the Board of the Assassination' [View all]Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Bryan Bender and Neil Swidey
The Boston Globe, Nov. 24, 2013
EXCERPT...
The newly released RFK papers contain an interesting postscript to all the cloak-and-dagger activity around Cuba. A secret CIA report entitled Staying power of the Castro regime concluded that the chances of a successful overthrow were slim. However, that report was written in the summer of 1964. In the months leading up to Dallas, acceptance of this idea had been far less widespread, especially among the people who most loathed Robert Kennedy, and, with him, his brother Jack.
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Still, if the killing of the president was, as some suspect, a conspiracy to neutralize his brother, why wouldnt the conspirators have simply gone after Bobby? Wouldnt that have been a lot easier, especially since the president had the Secret Service protecting him and the attorney general traveled unprotected, even famously leaving the front door of Hickory Hill unlocked?
It is all a matter of speculation, but there could have been a very practical explanation for a more circuitous path. If Bobby had been assassinated, historians point out, his brother could have been expected to marshal every ounce of his prodigious federal power to exact revenge on the murderers and their benefactors. And because the victim would not just be the countrys crusading attorney general but also the presidents brother, the public would have surely given Jack Kennedy a blank check of support for a crackdown on whatever dark forces he determined were responsible.
David Kaiser revealed in The Road To Dallas that prior to the assassination Marcello had been overheard fingering RFK as the main obstacle to his mob business that needed to be removed. After moaning about Bobbys persecution of him, Marcello uttered the Sicilian curse Take this stone from my shoe, and then concluded that theyd need to kill Jack to get to Bobby. If they went after Bobby directly, he allegedly said, they could expect the president to unleash the Marines on them.
Government documents released in the 1990s also indicate that decades later Marcello confessed to being part of JFKs murder to a prison cellmate, who was also an FBI informant working on an undercover operation.
Few people have as intimate knowledge of the contours of the assassination files as Rex Bradford. From his perch in Ipswich, Mass., Bradford is curator of a vast digitized archive of nearly 1 million documents, maintained by the nonprofit Mary Ferrell Foundation. Although he takes no public position on who killed Kennedy, Bradford says many of the newly released documents strengthen the hypothesis that hard-line intelligence people, hard-liners on Cuba were somehow involved in the assassination, with mob people tied into that same milieu.
But for him and many other serious people who have carefully studied the possibility of an assassination plot, connecting theories of tough characters with the motive to kill Kennedy to the reality of Lee Harvey Oswald in the window of the Texas School Book Depository has been elusive. Oswald, a failure at just about everything he tried and hardly an expert marksman, is no ones idea of the kind of man one would pick for the vanguard of such a plot.
If certain Cuban exiles and Cold War hard-liners had dreamed of a domino effect in which Castro was blamed for JFKs murder, precipitating an American invasion of Cuba, that never happened, of course. Nonetheless, all the back-channel efforts at peace quickly withered. New President Lyndon Johnson, insecure in his command of foreign affairs and lacking the credibility Kennedy had won by successfully staring down Khrushchev, was not about to risk being seen as weak against Communists in Havana or Moscow especially with an election less than a year away.
As for the mobsters, they could finally exhale. One week after Dallas, according to Kaiser, gangster Sam Giancana was caught on tape in a Chicago lounge saying, This is going to take the heat off us. The FBIs focus, he said, would be on Castro-sympathizing leftists for some time.
Jimmy Hoffa is said to have crowed to reporters in Nashville, Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.
CONTINUED...
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/24/his-brother-keeper-robert-kennedy-saw-conspiracy-jfk-assassination/TmZ0nfKsB34p69LWUBgsEJ/story.html
PS: Thank you for the heads-up on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s article in Rolling Stone. I will read every word in the coming weeks.