The Kennedy Assassination Scare and its Haunting Resonance

What the Corporate Media Isn’t Telling the American People

The September 15 assassination scare of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at a campaign event in Los Angeles, bears eerie resemblance to the assassination of Kennedy’s father, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel, less than two miles away.

Some of the facts are out, but many are not, with corporate media either indifferent, slanted, or both. Colleagues of mine at The Kennedy Beacon have launched a thorough investigation and will publish their findings in coming days.

This much we know for sure: a security officer detained a man before the police eventually arrested him. Kennedy described the scene in an Instagram post:

The man, wearing two shoulder holsters with loaded pistols and spare ammunition magazines was carrying a U.S. Marshal badge on a lanyard and beltclip federal ID. He identified himself as a member of my security detail. Armed GDBA team members moved quickly to isolate and detain the man until LAPD arrived to make the arrest

Predictably, the corporate media coverage of the story has been terrible. A Google search of the man’s name, “Adrian Paul Aispuro,” returns a number of news items. At the top of the list is an egregious piece of yellow journalism from Daily Beast “Senior Researcher,” Wiliam Bredderman. It would be hard to imagine a more irresponsible example of “journalism” than Bredderman’s.. The headline reads, “Anti-Vaxxer Held on $35K Bail After RFK Jr. Rally Arrest.”

What possible justification is there for using the headline to identify the armed suspect as, simply, “Anti-Vaxxer”? The epithet is a propaganda term of art for the pharmaceutical industry and its bought-off media courtiers. “Imposter” or “Armed Imposter Posing as Security Guard” would certainly have been much more suitable, relevant, and even sensationalist in terms of attracting readers. Obviously, the Daily Beast is serving a propaganda function by taking a deadly serious story and turning it into an occasion for inappropriately and nonsensically reinforcing the tedious “anti-vaxxer” smear that the corporate media has used to try and “cancel” Kennedy’s presidential campaign as well as his critiques of big pharma corruption.

Arguably even more disturbing are two other aspects of the Daily Beast article. First, the word “assassination” does not appear in the text. As such, there is nothing to explain to the reader the historic significance of the scenario that unfolded in L.A. Secondly, why does the Daily Beast use the arrested man’s middle name: “Adrian Paul Aispuro.” It is not conventional for journalists to identify criminal suspects like this. It is a very strange convention that infamous assassins are identified this way, but again, the article never mentions the word assassination. This seems creepy at best, sinister at worst.

I write “sinister” because of the context that Daily Beast mendaciously omits. Los Angeles was the city where Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. The site of the Ambassador Hotel—where RFK was fatally shot after winning the 1968 California primary—is not far from where this recent incident occurred. 

Although Sirhan Sirhan is still in jail for the murder of Senator Kennedy, many people—including, as reported in The Washington Post, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—have concluded that the case is unsolved and should be reopened.

The biggest problem with the state’s case against Sirhan is that it is contradicted by the senator’s autopsy, the forensic evidence, and the testimony of eyewitnesses at the scene—all of which indicate that Sirhan could not have fired the shots that hit Robert F. Kennedy. Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi determined that Kennedy was struck at near point blank range from behind by bullets traveling upward from right to left. Karl Uecker, the witness closest to the shooting later described the event:

[T]here was a distance of at least one and one-half feet between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. After Sirhan’s second shot, I pushed his hand that held the revolver down, and pushed him onto the steam table. There is no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. [He] never got close enough for a point-blank shot, never.

Another disturbing parallel between this latest incident and the 1968 RFK assassination is that the arrested man was impersonating a security guard. Many researchers and even Robert Kennedy Jr. himself believe that Senator Kennedy was killed by an intelligence asset posing as a security guard—a man named Thane Caesar. Like Aispuro, Caesar held ultra-rightist political views. Caesar was standing directly behind RFK when he was shot. Kennedy tore off Caesar’s clip-on tie as he fell to the ground where he still held it in his hand. Some witnesses testified that Caesar had drawn his sidearm or even that he had fired his gun.

Given the history of Robert Kennedy and Los Angeles, any serious and honest journalist reporting on this story should have sought to uncover who or what was behind the Aispuro spectacle. Perhaps the most—if not only—truly useful piece of information in the Daily Beast article comes from the statements made by Raymond Aispuro, the brother of the arrested imposter. He revealed that his brother is an out-of-work EMT who lives with his parents, is without a car, and who on that day requested a ride from Raymond to what he described as a one-day job working as security. As Raymond Aispuro explained to the Daily Beast,

[Adrian] told me that he was in communication with someone about a gig, like a private contract gig, a one-time deal, and he had to go that day to work it. […] I don’t know who he talks to or what, I just get whatever vague information he gives me. […] I really do think this is a situation where he got wrong information or he trusted someone he shouldn’t have.

The Daily Beast makes no discernible effort to explore this issue further. Those who understand the suppressed history of US political assassinations should grasp the grim implications of this episode.

For people who want to better understand such things, the “Chicago plot” of November 1963 is an important episode to investigate. Weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, there was a JFK assassination plot in the city of Chicago. The details were subsequently suppressed, and so the uncanny circumstances were largely unknown for years. Today, only assassination buffs and researchers typically know about the affair. 

On October 30, days before President Kennedy’s long-planned November 2 trip to Chicago, an FBI tip came in from an informant named “Lee.” The tip was eventually forwarded to alert the Chicago police about the existence of a four-man sniper team plotting to assassinate the president. Serendipitously, a landlady on the North side of Chicago phoned the FBI on Halloween (one day after the tip from “Lee”) to inform them that four suspicious men were renting rooms from her. In one of the rooms, she observed the presence of four rifles—each with a telescopic sight—along with a newspaper drawing of the presidential motorcade route. Mirroring the tragic circumstances in Dallas weeks later, JFK’s Chicago motorcade was to take a very slow curve at one point on its route through the city. Authorities arrested two of the four gunmen, but with two men still at large, the White House canceled the planned Chicago trip. Officials cited events in Vietnam as an excuse of sorts. Police records pertaining to the two detained gunmen—specifically the details of their interrogation and even their identities—vanished inexplicably after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas weeks later.

As with the successful assassination plot in Dallas, there was an apparent designated patsy in Chicago as well. Police had been monitoring a disturbed man named Thomas Arthur Vallee—an ex-Marine and John Birch Society member, who had been making threatening statements about President Kennedy. Vallee eventually got arrested, but only after the decision to cancel Kennedy’s visit to Chicago had been made. He was found to be in possession of an M1 rifle and a handgun—along with thousands of rounds of ammunition. 

The parallels between Thomas Arthur Vallee and Lee Harvey Oswald are grimly uncanny. Like Oswald, Vallee had been stationed as a Marine at a US base in Japan which ran U-2 flights. Valee, like Oswald, was likely recruited for US intelligence by an outfit called the Joint Technical Advisory Group. Vallee also had strange connections to anti-Castro Cubans. He told journalist Edwin Black that he had worked for the CIA at a site in Long Island where he trained Cuban ex-pats. Shortly before Lee Oswald’s fateful weekend in Dallas, he had moved back to Dallas from New Orleans where he had had several now infamous run-ins with Cuban exiles. Similarly, Vallee moved from New York—where he’d been training Cuban exiles—to Chicago where he was detained for being a suspected presidential assassination risk. Most disturbingly, Vallee—like Oswald—just happened to find work in a place situated right over a very sharp turn in a presidential motorcade route.

President Kennedy’s enemies were not able to gun him down in Chicago. The successful plot would be carried out in Dallas weeks later. It is crucial to note the parallels between these events in 1963 (Chicago and Dallas), 1968 (RFK’s assassination), and this 2023 RFK Jr. assassination scare. 

Aispuro’s similarity to Thomas Vallee, Lee Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and even Thane Caesar is unnerving. Who was it that recruited Aispuro and for what purpose? Was he supposed to be an assassin? Was he supposed to serve as a decoy like Sirhan while other shooters waited in the wings? Was his disordered personage meant to send a threatening message to Robert Kennedy Jr. to dissuade him from continuing his run for the presidency? Was Aispuro sent on this errand to help further implant the narrative that RFK Jr. is himself somehow fomenting the political paranoia and distrust that will ultimately lead to his assassination?

We cannot answer these questions at the moment. We can, however, highlight these issues in the hopes of raising public awareness of the mortal danger that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing. After the JFK assassination, Robert F. Kennedy told close associates that he believed his brother had been killed by the CIA working with the mafia and Cuban exiles. Robert Kennedy planned to reinvestigate the case after attaining the presidency. People like Jackie warned RFK that if he sought the presidency, the same people who killed Jack would kill him. Similarly, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison warned RFK’s people that the only way to deter Robert Kennedy’s own assassination would be to publicly announce that he was coming after his brother’s killers. RFK ignored this advice so we cannot know whether this would have made a difference. 

These details must haunt Robert Kennedy Jr. The suppressed history of the political assassinations of the 1960’s haunts America. Kennedy has publicly declared that, as president, he would seek to disclose the truth behind the assassinations of his uncle and father—along with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. as well. 

The Kennedy campaign and its supporters are in the strange position of having to request desperately needed Secret Service protection from a disgracefully defiant Biden White House. In other words, Kennedy is being denied state protection that he clearly warrants—yet, if we are honest, the greatest risk of his assassination may come from some dark quadrant of the state itself. Even if it is far from sufficient, informed people must seek to educate the public about the censored and suppressed history of the American state’s role in political assassinations. 

If such an effort is successful, perhaps the light of publicity might deter bad actors in high places. Somehow, it largely falls to all of us to protect the life of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.