Opinions #50/23

A stone in a pond that risks creating noise. It was thrown by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of the assassinated president and son of Robert, who himself was shot at the end of a rally during the campaign that promoted him to the presidency of the United States.

RFK Jr. said it, and now he’s done it: he wants the top-secret documents related to the JFK assassination made public. He declares this in a public petition, which is collecting an avalanche of signatures.

On November 22, 1963, the most beloved president in American history was assassinated. By law, these documents should have been released six years ago, more than half a century after the events. Trump at the White House refused to give his approval. And in his place, Democrat Biden also refused to do so, despite the fact that the Kennedy Records Assassination Act of 1992 required it.

What the jealously guarded documents might reveal has been a source of suspicion for decades. Not a murder planned and carried out by one killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, but a conspiracy. Conceived and carried out by that deep state, which also represents the dark soul of the United States. The “deep state,” in which the CIA, according to Kennedy Jr., was a decisive actor in the terrorist attack in Dallas.

“This is something my uncle discovered in 1960/61. He realized during the Bay of Pigs crisis that the CIA had devolved into an agency whose function was to provide the military-industrial complex with a constant source of new wars. And my uncle realized the CIA had lied to him, and he fired Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, Charles Cabell, Richard Bissell, the three top people in the CIA. And he said at that time: ‘I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.’”

In his statements on television, social networks, and the press, RFK Jr. does not ask for justice, since the family tragedy directly affected him. But that makes it a political assumption. Because RFK Jr. is also a candidate for next year’s presidential election. An inconvenient candidate for everyone. And from all points of view.

He took the field before the summer to encourage the Democratic Party to find an alternative to Biden, with whom he has been friends for decades and remains friends. A president who is too old and, in RFK Jr.’s opinion, incapable of governing a country more disoriented and divided than ever before in its recent history.

RFK Jr. is so unwieldy, with a name that tickles the liberal electorate, and so attractive to Republicans who want anything but four more years of Biden, that he is now an inconvenient rival. The mainstream, which used to willfully ignore him and then moved on to mock his anti-vax positions (pre-Covid), is now starting to take him into account. If Time, CNN, and Fivethirtyeight polls show his favorable rating stable at around 40 percent, his may’s nomination risks becoming problematic for the two official contenders: Biden and Trump both have problems among large swathes of their respective electorates.

But RFK Jr. doesn’t just want to declassify documents that he believes will confirm judicial manipulation, unfinished investigations, impossible ballistic reconstructions such as the “magic bullet”, the opaque work of the Warren Commission (which Dulles himself, the ousted leader of Cia, wanted to be a part), unjustifiably hidden for 64 years. The stated and repeated intention is to do what his uncle could not do because he was eliminated: dismantle the CIA. RFK Jr., if elected, wants it to return to being an agency that gathers information rather than creates pretexts to fuel what President Eisenhower, a general who won two-term at White House, defined in his last State of the Union address as risk to american democracy: the military-industrial complex.

A very powerful and bulimic war machine that RFK Jr. openly rebelled against. Confirming the speciousness of the war in Ukraine. “We should have listened to Putin over many years. We made a commitment to Russia, to Gorbachev, that we would not move NATO one inch to the east. Then we went in, and we lied. We went into 13 NATO countries, we put missile systems in with nuclear capacity; we did joint exercises with Ukraine (…). If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal today. Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world.”.

If geopolitics is “the often-stated ambition of neocons,” then Democrats, according to RFK Jr., are united. “President Biden has said that was his intention to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army.”

A culturally sophisticated man, a highly successful environmental lawyer, the son and nephew of great liberal leaders, who opposes the highest American authority. It would seem an impossible and very risky task. A risk that RFK Jr. is fully aware of. To some interviewers who asked him if he was afraid that he would end up like John Kennedy and Bob Kennedy, he answered without hesitation: “I am aware of this danger.”

Yes, but can the twenty-first century United States overcome another act with the same name of the same tragedy?