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 Entertainment | Books | May 2007 
Plot Thickens in New Book about JFK
 George Rush & Joanna Rush Molloy - montereyherald.com
President John F. Kennedy was almost certainly the victim of a CIA-Mafia plot, according to a new book that reveals Robert Kennedy's secret efforts to expose such a scheme.
RFK's contacts in Florida's Cuban exile community actually may have told him of Lee Harvey Oswald's existence months before Dallas, David Talbot writes in "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years." Thus, on the afternoon of his brother's assassination, RFK stunned one anti-Castro leader by telling him, "One of your guys did it."
"Bobby was our first conspiracy theorist," Talbot tells us. "The CIA and FBI were trying to portray Oswald as a communist. Bobby rejected that immediately."
Besides confiscating autopsy evidence (including JFK's brain), RFK visited Mexico City in 1964 to find out more about Oswald, who'd traveled south of the border before the assassination. While there, RFK was put under surveillance by Mexican intelligence and the CIA.
Within hours of Jack Ruby's murder of Oswald, RFK learned that Ruby was a Mafia "errand boy" paid by associates of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, according to the riveting book. RFK later met with longtime nemesis Hoffa to try to learn more.
Talbot believes Bobby was on the right trail. Among the evidence of CIA involvement was a deathbed confession by Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt to attending a 1963 meeting at a "CIA safe house" in Miami where other operatives tried to recruit him for "the big event" — namely killing Kennedy.
"The Kennedy administration was a government at war with itself," the Salon.com founder tells us. JFK was so concerned about assassination or a military coup that he convinced Hollywood pals such as Frank Sinatra and director John Frankenheimer to make "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Seven Days in May" as a warning to the American people.
Among the more amusing revelations from Talbot, who founded Slate.com:
· William Walton, a closeted gay friend of Jack and Jackie, "shared sexual confidences" with the couple. "Jack was comfortable enough to ask Walton to squire his mistresses to White House events," writes Talbot. Jackie adored Walton's "bohemian style, with his fondness for wearing tight blue jeans and work shirts ... and his love of gossip."
· J. Edgar Hoover "snooped on the Kennedys with more relish than he did on organized crime bosses." Retaliating, Bobby and wife Ethel "sometimes set loose their high-spirited brood on the prim director's office, where the kids would go toppling into his giant flower pots." RFK daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend recalls bringing their Newfie, Brumus, who would come "romping in and slobbering all over his office." |
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