12-03-06, 10:03 am
Disturbing evidence concerning the 1968 assassination of Bobby Kennedy surfaced recently near the time of what would have been Kennedy's 81st birthday. Bobby Kennedy's assassination was the third among three assassinations of the 1960s shrouded in controversy, which included his brother President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
The first claimed the life of his brother, President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, who as a U.S. soldier had earlier had “defected” to the Soviet Union, returned to the U.S. with a Russian wife. Oswald continued to publicly call himself a Marxist and involved himself in the pro-Cuban Revolution Fairplay for Cuba Committee before settling in Dallas. He was arrested for the assassination.
After the initial shock of the assassination, Oswald was murdered in a Dallas Police station on national television by Jack Ruby, a strip club owner with long-time mob connections. In the aftermath, a national commission headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren determined that he had been a lone assassin motivated by his own hatred of the president, not part of any larger political conspiracy.
This view was widely rejected, particularly by left oriented writers, who challenged both the forensic evidence involved (that there was only one shooter) and Oswald's very murky activities Was it possible that a former U.S. defector who returned from the USSR with a Russian wife was not under heavy surveillance, unless something else was going on? Then there was the convenient nature of his own murder by someone with Ruby's background.
On the left, many speculated that the murder had been arranged by elements of the Central Intelligence Agency who despised Kennedy for his failure to use the U.S. military to aid the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba which they had organized and directed. Skeptics also felt that CIA elements may have been angered by Kennedy's subsequent “failure” to launch a pre-emptive strike and invasion against Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis.
Oswald, in these interpretations, was seen as a patsy. There were easy similarities between Oswald and someone like the mentally disturbed Dutch homeless person and former Communist, Van Der Lubbe, whom the Nazis in 1933 used as a patsy to blame the German Communist Party and the Soviet Union for the Reichstag Fire in order to justify their establishment of a dictatorship.
Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968, removed from U.S. society not only the most important leader of the Civil Rights movement but the most significant American progressive leader of the post World War II era. Until these new Kennedy revelations, I had always considered the King assassination to be the least credible of the three. The killer, James Earl Ray was a professional criminal – racially bigoted but not necessarily more so than large numbers of Americans at the time. He claimed that he had been recruited for the act by a mysterious figure named “Carlos” in Canada. He also was able to escape to Britain, where he was caught. The U.S. government steered clear of any serious investigation of the King assassination and authorities continue to turn a deaf ear to the longtime and ongoing pleas of the King family to re-open the case.
Bobby Kennedy was murdered on June 4, 1968, just as he had defeated Eugene McCarthy in the California primary and was about to move on. As a McCarthy supporter at the time, I was depressed by his victory, but it was very clear even to me that Kennedy, who had opposed the Vietnam War and who had huge support among labor, African Americans, and Latinos, was the only candidate from the antiwar wing of the Democratic party who could beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic convention, unite progressives with traditional Democratic voters and defeat Richard Nixon, the likely Republican candidate and the segregationist “independent” candidate, George Wallace. Nixon was appealing to war weariness and the racist backlash against the ghetto riots with his “law and order” slogan. Wallace was instigating and seeking to expand the backlash into a racist hysteria that would sweeping away the recently enacted Civil Rights laws and threaten the democratic rights and civil liberties of all Americans.
In the aftermath of Robert Kennedy's assassination, the Johnson-Humphrey cold war Democrats regained control of the party, anti-war and cultural protestors, and along with progressive Democrats and innocent bystanders were terrorized on the streets of Chicago by rioting police during the National Democratic convention. George Wallace's racist American Independent party took off and at one point was challenging Humphrey for second place in the polls.
Even though the Wallace vote dropped significantly and labor and progressive forces rallied to turn what had been a 30 point Nixon lead after the Chicago convention into a close election, Nixon won, and Wallace received nearly ten million votes. The stage was then set for the Republicans long-term “southern strategy”– winning over Wallace's constituency on covert and not so covert racist appeals to block effective equal rights for minorities (and within a few years, women). Along with appeals to a “new religious right” on a variety of social issues, that “southern strategy” remains at the heart of right-wing politics in the U.S. to this day as the Southern states have been the most important political base for conservative Republicans.
Although it is less clear that Bobby Kennedy's assassination was as major turning point in U.S. history as Martin Luther King's certainly was, we do know what Nixon's victory did mean. So the new evidence concerning the assassination deserves to be looked at very seriously.
Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, was accused of having murdered Kennedy. Sirhan was there and he was the man who was grabbed and arrested. He also had a gun.Sirhan supposedly believed that Kennedy was “pro-Israel” and would sell U.S. planes to the Israelis.
First, the motive was rather strange. While Kennedy was certainly pro Israel, so were his major Democratic opponents and indeed most political and military establishment figures after the Israelis decisive victory in the Six Day war of 1967.
Writings in Sirhan room were strange, almost as if he were under some drug or hypnotic trance. Sirhan's account the events, which he claimed not to remember, was also very strange. While a great many people, myself included, dismissed all this as simply the actions of a psychopath, not a real life version of the plot of the popular 1960s film, The Manchurian Candidate, Shane O'Sullivan has found material that raises new questions about the assassination.
First it is easy to dismiss O'Sullivan who has been working on a screen play about the Kennedy assassination for three years. It is even possible to see his revelations as some kind of publicity stunt aimed at piggy backing on the publicity generated by the new film about the Kennedy assassination, 'Bobby,' to generate support for his work. But it is not so easy to dismiss some the sources that O'Sullivan has used to provide evidence for his findings.
To try to make a long story short, there are discrepancies in the official story concerning the number of bullet holes found where the assassination took place – more than could have come from Sirhan's gun. And the distance at which the fatal shot was fired is in dispute. One of the people present, O'Sullivan believe, after examining TV news footage, might have been Manuel Sanchez Morales, a truly a truly notorious CIA rogue.
Morales' involvement in CIA coups and conspiracies in Latin America was well-known. Morales had also said privately to associates in 1973, as the Watergate conspiracy was catching U.S. and global attention, “I was in Dallas when we got the Son of a Bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.”
O'Sullivan matched an old photograph of Morales to the TV news coverage and his suspicions were strengthened. Morales had headed the Miami station of the CIA in 1963, when JFK was assassinated (at the time, the largest in the world and organizing sabotage, terror and assassination activities against Cuba and its leaders).
O'Sullivan contacted Bradley Ayers, a retired army officer who had been under Morales in the CIA's Miami office. Ayers told him that he was “95% sure” that Morales was the man at the Ambassador Hotel. To O'Sullivan's surprise, Ayers also recognized Gordon Campbell, another CIA operative in the hotel photographs. Other sources, including a former CIA “free lance” operative, David Rabern, involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, provided further confirmation, including an alleged meeting between Morales and Campbell in the hotel lobby shortly before the assassination. O'Sullivan also believed he recognized a third CIA operative, John Joannides, as having been present in the hotel.
All of the claims of these former CIA agents are of course dubious, just as the various intelligence files that scholars looked at are filled with errors, conscious exaggerations, and outright lies.
But O'Sullivan does interview one credible person, Wayne Smith.
Smith was a long-time State Department and official who served in the Cuban embassy at the time of the revolution. He subsequently was appointed head of the State Department's Latin American Task Force by John Kennedy in 1961. President Carter appointed him head of the U.S. interest section in Cuba in 1979 and he left that position in 1982 because of strong opposition to the Reagan administration's Cuban and Latin American policies. Smith has written very widely from what I would call a liberal perspective on U.S. Cuban relations, including The Closest of Enemies: Personal and Diplomatic Account of United States Cuban Relations and many other works, advocating improved relations and challenging the anti-Cuban consensus in Washington
When Smith, he knew Morales at the Cuban embassy in 1959-1960, before the U.S. essentially ended relations with the Cuban government, was shown the video of the people in Ambassador hotel on the night of the assassination, he recognized Morales and told O'Sullivan, “that' him. That's Morales.” He also volunteered that in 1975, at a cocktail party in Buenos Aires, Morales told me that Kennedy “had got what was coming to him.” As for the possibility that Morales might have been there to provide some security for RFK, a suggestion that others who also recognized Morales had made, Smith laughed and said that Morales despised the Kennedys, whom he blamed for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, long after their deaths.
Morales died of a heart attack in 1978, shortly before he was to testify before a joint congressional committee investigating CIA covert actions. Campbell, who may possibly still be alive, according to O'Sullivan, served as an advisor to that committee. The official CIA story is that Morales was stationed in Laos in 1968, but, given the fact that he entire career was based in Latin American “covert action,” this seems somewhat strange.
What is interesting about all of this is how little it has been picked up by U.S. media, even at a time that the film 'Bobby' has been released. Perhaps the establishment fears that revealing the possible activities in the United States of men like Morales, who were certainly involved in acts of subversion and terror abroad for the CIA, might lead to serious investigations of what the intelligence/police agencies have done at home and abroad, instead of what he have had from the Warren Commission to the 9/11 Commission, blue ribbon panels and commissions interested primarily in protecting the agencies and authorities that they are investigating,
Without saying (because I really don't know) that these allegations are true, one can say that they, along with the King assassination, deserve some serious investigation and analysis. Perhaps Teddy Kennedy might want to address this question, both to ascertain the role that police and intelligence agents may have played in changing U.S. history and to look at what may be new findings related to his brother's assassination.
--Reach Norman Markowitz at
