Democratic White House contender Robert Kennedy Jr. recently blamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.
Kennedy Jr., the son of assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, made the allegation on Sunday with John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM’s “Cats Roundtable.” Theories around JFK’s assassination have endured throughout the decades, with many others speculating that the CIA, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, the mafia, the Soviet KGB, Jackie Onassis Kennedy, or the Fidel Castro regime—or some combination thereof—were involved in his death.
“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder. I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point,” Kennedy said about the November 1963 incident in Dallas, Texas. “The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder, and in the cover-up,” he also said.
Kennedy made reference to the book, “JFK and the Unspeakable,” penned by James Douglas, for some of his assertions. The book theorized that Kennedy was assassinated because he sought peacemaking during the Cold War and was then killed by his own security apparatus.
The federal government concluded during its Warren Commission Report that shooter Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone suspect in the assassination. They said there was no credible evidence to suggest that he was part of a wider assassination conspiracy.
Oswald was shot and killed by alleged Chicago mob associate Jack Ruby two days after Oswald was accused of the assassination. Ruby would be later convicted of the murder and sentenced to death, but he died in prison several years later.
The CIA has long denied any involvement in the former president’s death. An article published on the intelligence agency’s website (pdf) says that it was a “lie” that connected the CIA “to the Kennedy assassination,” alleging it was part of a Soviet KGB “disinformation” campaign and then cast aspersions against director Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK, ” which strongly suggested that the CIA and other federal officials may have been involved in the assassination.
“Unfounded assertions of CIA complicity were bolstered inadvertently by a series of investigations of the Intelligence Community in the 1970s. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission report was followed by the 1976 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA),” that article stated.
“All examined the CIA’s activities both before and after Kennedy’s assassination, and, in the case of HSCA, specifically looked into Shaw’s supposed role as a high-ranking operative,” it added, referring to businessman and military officer Clay Shaw, who was arrested and charged on March 1, 1967, with conspiring to kill President Kennedy. Two years later he was acquitted by a jury.
The article stated: “The bottom line in each instance gave no credence to any of [local District Attorney Jim] Garrison’s allegations about Shaw and the CIA. Inexorably, however, the mere fact that such questions were asked helped fashion Garrison into something of a prophet in the public mind.” Garrison’s allegations were prominently featured in the “JFK” film.
The Epoch Times has contacted the CIA for comment.
Other Claims
Kennedy Jr.’s claims on Sunday aren’t the first time he’s floated the notion that the CIA killed his uncle. He’s also claimed in the past that his father wasn’t killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian man who supported communism.
“I also hope that the governor will consider the overwhelming evidence that Sirhan is not my father’s killer,” Kennedy Jr. wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021.
He wrote: “For many years, I accepted the orthodoxy that Sirhan was responsible. After all, dozens of eyewitnesses in the Ambassador Hotel pantry saw him fire his gun from just a few feet in front of my father. But in 2016, my father’s close friend, Paul Schrade, persuaded me to read Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report and to listen to audio recordings and review other evidence indicating that Sirhan could not have been the murderer.”
Kennedy went on to say that Sirhan fired two shots at Kennedy, an upstart senator from New York who was running as a Democrat in 1968, and one of the bullets, he said, struck Schrade in the head. The other bullet hit a door jamb. He then fired more shots, hitting several other bystanders, Kennedy Jr. alleged.
However, none of those bullets struck his father, Kennedy Jr. said, floating the theory that the four shots that hit his father “were from within a few inches, with two leaving gun powder residue in the wounds, suggesting that the assassin was standing close behind my father, shielding his weapon with his body while all attention focused on Sirhan.”
He also alleged that Los Angeles police investigators “bullied and badgered eyewitnesses to change their statements regarding the number of shots and to silence those who say they saw Cesar draw and shoot his gun and those who reported conspirators dashing from the scene.”
Thane Eugene Cesar, he said, was the individual who killed his father. Before the Sirhan shooting, Cesar—a recently hired security guard—grabbed Kennedy by the elbow and steered him toward Sirhan, he said.
“Bedeviled by questions about his involvement in my father’s murder, Cesar fled to the Philippines. I was in negotiations with him in 2018, before reports of his death in September 2019. After first agreeing to meet with me, he gradually escalated his price to $25,000 for the privilege of interviewing him,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and writer, declared his candidacy for president several weeks ago. A recent Fox News poll showed that 19 percent of voters favored him.