The Conspiracy Against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

By David Talbot, Weekly Columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

If you’re tagged as “conspiracy-obsessed” by the corporate media—like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other critics of the U.S. establishment—consider yourself marginalized. Consider yourself canceled.

Of course, a “conspiracy” is in the eye of the beholder. The word comes from the Latin for “breathe together”—or whispering. That’s the way those in power operate. They speak quietly behind closed doors. They don’t announce their plans.

It was a conspiracy when the Lyndon Johnson administration fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident and used it to escalate the war in Vietnam. It was a conspiracy when the Richard Nixon administration planned to “neutralize” Vietnam antiwar protesters and covered up the multiple crimes that came to be known as the Watergate scandal. It was a conspiracy when the Ronald Reagan administration covertly sold weapons to the regime in Iran and used the funds to illegally finance the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. It was a conspiracy when the administration of George W. Bush promoted the terrifying specter of Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpile and exploited the lie to invade Iraq.

And it’s a conspiracy to drive RFK, Jr. from the 2024 presidential race. Through a constant barrage of negative media coverage, including gotcha “reporting,” distortions and outright lies, Kennedy’s been declared a political untouchable. Of course, you’ll never find the memo—the campaign against Kennedy is a corporate media pile-on, but it looks spontaneous.

That’s the way power often operates —quietly, stealthily, yes, conspiratorially. To speak truthfully invites discussion, debate—and those who climb to the top in government or the corporate world want to avoid that. Democracy can be unwieldy, messy and unpredictable.

But the media don’t usually tag those in power “conspiracists.” Powerful officials might be responsible for secret plans to overthrow governments, to stifle public dissent, to start illegal wars. But those actions–– even though they're generally tumultuous and bloody—are portrayed as the prerogatives of power.

Critics of power, however, are a different story. Media executives and their loyal reporters have decided that RFK,Jr. is an “anti-vaxxer,” an “extremist,” a “conspiracy freak”—smears meant to publicly diminish him, to undercut the validity of his social critiques. Kennedy’s attacks on the permanent war lobby which has taken over the Democratic Party and the Biden presidency––and the corporate capture of federal regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration ring true for many of us because they are true.

But instead of responding to these persuasive attacks, those in power resort to tarring Kennedy as conspiracy-minded and paranoid.

Let me cite one example.

One of the most flagrant “conspiracy theories” advocated by Kennedy, according to The New York Times and other major media outlets, is that the CIA was behind the 1963 assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Wacky idea, right? Actually, it’s grounded in fact—a “conspiracy” that the majority of Americans believe to be true, according to poll after poll. 

To be completely accurate, RFK, Jr. doesn’t believe that the CIA as an institution carried out the JFK assassination and cover-up. In fact, he has repeatedly said that the CIA is filled with many patriotic and honorable public servants, like his daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who formerly worked for the agency. But the evidence mounts that top CIA officials and ex-officials like Allen Dulles, James Angleton, Richard Helms and William Harvey, as well as leading generals like Air Force chief Curtis LeMay, conspired to kill President Kennedy because they opposed his plans to end the Cold War.

Even The New York Times itself—which over the decades has clung to the increasingly threadbare theory that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated the president by himself – earlier this week published an article revealing that Oswald, a “lone-nut” the agency claimed was not on its radar, was the target of a mail-opening operation run by a man named Reuben Efron, a spy who worked in Angleton’s CIA counterintelligence division. This follows a disclosure last year that suggested Oswald was working with the CIA in the months before the Kennedy assassination, trying to discredit pro-Castro supporters in the U.S. Oswald himself shouted out to reporters after his arrest that he was a “patsy,” set up to take the fall for the epic crime.

The eye-opening revelations about Oswald were brought to the media’s attention by longtime JFK assassination researcher and former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley. He and the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an online archive, recently brought suit against the Biden administration, which announced it will not force the CIA to comply with the 1992 JFK Act and release the estimated nearly 5,000 documents still kept secret.

“People say there’s nothing significant in these files,” Morley told The New York Times. “Bingo! Here’s the guy (Efron) who was reading Oswald’s mail, a detail (the CIA) failed to share until now. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to think it’s suspicious.”

So, is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a “nut” to say that CIA officials arranged the murder of his uncle and covered up the horrific crime—a crime that tragically changed the course of American history? No, of course not. 

I’m one of the many journalists, historians and researchers who’ve investigated this dark history. Over the years, we have shed light on the crime and its context, books that have been read by RFK,Jr. and many other concerned citizens.

Robert F. Kennedy,Jr. knows the terrible truth about what happened in Dallas nearly six decades ago. The conspirators got away with their crime. The New York Times and the rest of the corporate media allowed them to. With his campaign for president, Kennedy is at last demanding the full truth, not just for his family but for the entire nation.

In 1961, Allen Dulles—the CIA director who was fired by President Kennedy later that year after the agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—chose a biblical inscription for the lobby of the new CIA headquarters: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” There was a heavy irony to the quote, considering Dulles’s long history of lies and deception.

But the passage from the Book of John is not a bad guiding light for a country that has long struggled in the darkness—and continues to do so.

David Talbot is the author of The Devil’s Chessboard and Brothers.