All things considered, it can only be by an outstanding hypocrisy that The Jewish Daily Forward wrote, on June 6, 2008: “In remembering Bobby Kennedy, let us remember not just what he lived for, but also what he died for—namely, the precious nature of the American-Israeli relationship.”489 Robert Kennedy’s death had not been a bad thing for the precious “American-Israeli relationship.” As a US president, would he have saved Israel from disaster in 1973, as had Nixon and Kissinger by providing it with unlimited military support against Egypt? Nothing is less sure.
But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Robert Kennedy was perceived as pro-Israel in 1968. All the same, Israel would have had a compelling motive to eliminate him, for the simple reason that Robert was, above all else, his brother’s heir and avenger.
All of his biographers have stressed his total commitment and loyalty to his brother John, whom he idolized. In return, John had come to trust his judgment on almost every issue, and had made him, not only his attorney general, but also his closest adviser. Robert didn’t have John’s charisma, nor his ambition. He felt that his brother’s coat, which he had literally worn during his first months of mourning, was too big for him. If he finally decided to run for president in 1968, it was under the pressure of destiny. As a lover of Greek tragedies, Robert believed in fate. And he knew that he was, in the eyes of millions of Americans, the legitimate heir to the murdered king—as well as his avenger, even if the thought was rarely voiced. His public appearances led to displays of fervor never seen before for a presidential candidate, and his total lack of concern for his own security made him look all the more genuine.
This exceptional brotherly friendship between John and Robert has an obvious implication for the investigator into Robert’s death. And the fact that this is seldom mentioned is a cause for wonder. As Lance deHaven-Smith has remarked in Conspiracy Theory in America, “It is seldom considered that the Kennedy assassinations might have been serial murders. In fact, in speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, ‘Kennedy assassinations’. […] Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassination(s) lexicon reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways.”490
John and Robert were two brothers united by an unshakable love and loyalty,. What is the probability that their murders are unrelated? Rather, we should start with the assumption that they are related. For there is a good chance that their solution resides in the link between them. In fact, common sense naturally leads to the hypothesis that Robert was prevented from becoming president because, obsessed with justice as he was, he had to be prevented from reaching a position where he could reopen the case of his brother’s death. Both murders have at least two things in common: Johnson and Israel. First, consider the fact that they precisely frame the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who controlled both investigations: Johnson became president the day of John’s death, and he retired a few months after Robert’s death. As for Israel’s implication, the plot to blame an anti-Israel Palestinian gives it away in Robert’s case. In John’s case, Israel’s fingerprints are even more unmistakable, and one must wonder why most investigators make so much effort not to see them.
Was there, in 1968, any reason to believe that Robert intended to reopen the investigation into his brother’s death, once in the White House? The answer is yes. From November 22, 1963, Robert was alienated and closely monitored by Johnson and Hoover. Although still attorney general, he knew he was powerless against the forces that had killed his brother. Yet he lost no time beginning his own investigation. He first asked CIA director John McCone, a Kennedy friend, to find out if the plot had anything to do with the agency. In March 1964, he had a face-to-face conversation with mobster Jimmy Hoffa, his sworn enemy, whom he had battled for ten years, and whom he suspected of having taken revenge on his brother. Robert also asked his friend Daniel Moynihan to search for any complicity in the Secret Service, which had been responsible for the president’s security in Dallas.491 And of course Robert suspected Johnson, whom he had always despised and mistrusted. “Johnson lies all the time,” he is reported saying. “I’m just telling you, he just lies continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I’ve said, he lies even when he doesn’t have to.”492
In fact, a week after JFK’s death, November 29, 1963, Bill Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, went to Moscow and handed to Georgi Bolshakov (the agent who had already carried secret communications between Khrushchev and Kennedy) a message for Khrushchev from Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy. According to the memo found in the Soviet archives in the 90s by Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali (One Hell of a Gamble, 1998), they wanted to inform the Soviet premier that they believed John Kennedy had been “the victim of a right-wing conspiracy,” “that only RFK could implement John Kennedy’s vision, and that the cooling that might occur in U.S.-Soviet relations because of Johnson would not last forever.”493
Johnson had several cards in his hand to keep Robert quiet. One of them was his Cuban-Soviet conspiracy theory, which could be reactivated at any time. Its purpose was twofold: it made it possible to silence all conspiracy theories under the veiled threat of nuclear war, but it was also designed to silence Robert Kennedy, for it came with the accessory theory that Castro had killed John Kennedy in retaliation for Robert Kennedy’s attempts on his life. In 1967, in an effort to stop Robert from running for president, Johnson leaked the idea to Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, who spread the rumor. Hundreds of newspapers reported in March: “President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot [against Castro] which then possibly backfired against his late brother.”494 The obvious implication was that Robert was responsible for his brother’s death. This theory still occasionally surfaces, for example in Gus Russo, Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK (1998), which even suggests that Oswald had been originally trained to assassinate Castro.
When the Warren Commission report was released, Robert Kennedy had no choice but to publicly endorse it, but “privately he was dismissive of it,” as his son Robert Kennedy, Jr. remembers.495 To friends who wondered why he wouldn’t voice his doubt, he said: “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”496 Yet Robert contacted an MI6 officer friend of the Kennedy family (dating back to the days when Joe Kennedy was the US Ambassador to England), who made arrangements for two French intelligence operatives to conduct, over a three-year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. One of them was André Ducret, head of the security for French President Charles De Gaulle. Over the years, these French secret agents hired men to infiltrate the Texas oil industry, the CIA, and Cuban mercenary groups in Florida. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968.
After Bobby’s death, the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, showed no interest in the material. The agents then hired a French writer by the name of Hervé Lamarr to fashion the material into a book, under the pseudonym of James Hepburn.497 The book was first published in French under the title L’Amérique brûle, and translated into eleven languages. No major US publisher was willing to print it, but it nevertheless circulated under the title Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK. Its conclusion is worth quoting: “President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared. […] the plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a ‘madman’ and negligence.”498
Robert Kennedy had planned to run for the pr
esidency in 1972, but the horrors of Vietnam and the realization of the urgency of the time precipitated his decision to run in 1968. Another factor may have been the opening of an investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967. Garrison was privileged to see Abraham Zapruder’s amateur film, confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination, whose images show that the fatal shot came from the grassy knoll well in front of the president, not the School Book Depository located behind. Garrison’s investigation, however, suffered a smear campaign and the mysterious deaths of his two main suspects and witnesses, Guy Banister and David Ferrie.
When talk of the investigation began, Kennedy asked one of his closest advisors, Frank Mankiewicz, to follow its developments: “I want you to look into this, read everything you can, so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.” He confided to his friend William Attwood, then editor of Look magazine, that he, like Garrison, suspected a conspiracy, “but I can’t do anything until we get control of the White House.”499 He refrained from openly supporting Garrison, believing that since the outcome of the investigation was uncertain, it could jeopardize his plans to reopen the case later, and even weaken his chances of election by construing his motivation as a family feud. Garrison claims that Robert sent him a message through a mutual friend: “Keep up the good work. I support you and when I’m president I am going to blow the whole thing wide open.” But Garrison rightly feared that Robert would not live long enough, and thought that speaking out publicly would have protected him.500
In conclusion, there can be no doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have reopened the case of his brother’s assassination, in one way or another. This certainly did not escape John’s murderers. They had no other way to stop him than by killing him.
History seems to replay indefinitely the mythical struggle of Seth against Osiris. The story of the Kennedy brothers and their nemesis Lyndon Johnson is an Osirian tragedy, with two Irish-Catholic siblings as Osiris and, playing Seth, a crypto-Jewish Texan who, having seized the throne by murder, hastened to tie the destiny of America to that of Israel. This time, Seth did not give Horus a chance: John John (JFK Jr.), who had turned three on the day of his father’s funeral, was eliminated in a suspicious plane crash on July 16, 1999, in the company of his pregnant wife and sister-in-law.
At the age of 39, JFK Jr. was preparing to enter politics. In 1995 he founded George magazine, which seemed harmless until it began to take an interest in political assassinations. In March 1997, George published a 13-page article by Guela Amir, the mother of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had offended the Israeli right-wing by agreeing to a “land for peace” exchange with the Palestinians. Guela Amir revealed that her son operated under the guardianship of a Shin Bet agent opposed to the peace process.501 Thus, John Jr. was eliminated while following in the footsteps of his father, entering politics through the door of journalism and taking an interest in the crimes of the Israeli deep state.
In 1968, the death of Robert Kennedy benefited Republican Richard Nixon, who won the presidency eight years after being beaten by John F. Kennedy. Nixon made Henry Kissinger his national security advisor. Secretary of State William Rogers, who was trying to reduce US military involvement around the world, went head-to-head with Kissinger on the issue of Palestine, finally resigning in 1973 while complaining that Kissinger was sabotaging his efforts for a just and equitable peace. Kissinger replaced Rogers, filling both positions simultaneously for the first time in history, giving him total control over foreign policy. Thus, when Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur War on October 6, 1973, with the aim of recovering the territories illegally occupied by Israel, Nixon responded to the call of Golda Meir and saved Israel from disaster by ordering an airlift supplying the Zionists with almost unlimited weapons. After the war, US military assistance to Israel intensified.
In April 1974, however, Nixon attempted to regain control, and sent the deputy director of the CIA, General Vernon Walters, to a secret meeting with PLO leaders without informing Kissinger. Walters returned convinced of the legitimacy and good faith of Yasser Arafat. In July 1974, Nixon himself traveled to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, and Jordan and criticized Israel’s intransigence. On August 6, 1974, Nixon announced to Kissinger that he intended to cut off all military and economic aid to Israel if it refused to comply with the UN resolutions.502 Just three days later, Nixon was forced to resign by the intensification of the Watergate scandal. Bob Woodward, the journalist who broke the scandal, had a rather curious background, revealed by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup (1991): he had been hired by The Washington Post on the recommendation of its president Paul Ignatius, the former Navy secretary appointed by Johnson in 1967. Woodward had worked five years for the Navy in the communications sector with a top-secret security clearance.503
Nixon was replaced by his vice-president Gerald Ford, a former member of the Warren Commission, known for his pro-Israel positions. One of his first decisions was to recognize Jerusalem as capital of the Jewish state, in violation of UN resolutions. Under Ford, the infiltration of Israel into the heart of the American state apparatus entered a new stage, which we will explore in the next chapter.
The Triumph of Zionist Propaganda
During the period studied in this chapter, the United States plunged into a deep, covert war, most of which remains completely hidden from an American public who nevertheless confusedly feels that American democracy died in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The lie about Kennedy’s assassination infected the national psyche, as a repressed secret festering in the unconscious of America and making it vulnerable to other lies. Every lie creates a predisposition to falsehood, and even the need for other lies to cover it. Conversely, the unveiling of a lie may unravel other lies, perhaps even the whole fabric of untruth out of which twentieth-century American history is woven. That is why we still see today, on the part of the government, a fierce desire to perpetuate the lie about Kennedy’s death.
The Johnson years also mark a turning point in American Jewish public opinion. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the majority felt that Jews were doing very well in the Diaspora. Few had any desire to emigrate to Palestine as required by the Zionist creed. Many also feared that the creation of a Jewish state would lead to accusations of dual loyalty. Theodor Herzl had replied in advance to this fear by asserting that, on the contrary, assimilated Jews who did not wish to live in Palestine would be freed from the suspicion of double loyalty by their very choice: “They would no longer be disturbed in their ‘chromatic function,’ as Darwin puts it, but would be able to assimilate in peace, because the present anti-Semitism would have been stopped for ever.”504
Yet even before the creation of Israel, the Zionists, through the Yiddish press in particular, were demanding of American Jews that if they did not emigrate to Israel, they should at least be loyal and generous to Zionism. This moral requirement became even stronger during the first two decades of the post-war period, by which time the Jews had become “the most prosperous, educated, politically influential, and professionally accomplished ethnoreligious group in the United States,” in Yuri Slezkine’s words.505 Zionist pressure tore the fabric of the American Jewish community. “It is not Palestine alone that has been partitioned. A vast number of American Jews were split in two by the same political act,” wrote Alfred Lilienthal in his book What Price Israel? (1953).506 Another anti-Zionist Jewish journalist, William Zukerman, was also subjected to violent attacks for denouncing in 1934 “the threat of Jewish fascism” and then in 1955 “the wave of hysteria currently unleashed among American Jews” by “a propaganda campaign on the part of a foreign government.”507 This quarrel remained essentially internal to the Jewish community, and the voices of the anti-Zionist Jews were largely stifled in the public debate. In the 1960s they became increasingly rare, so that gradually
the mass of American Jews was encouraged to feel Israeli at heart.
However, until 1967, American Jews remained discreet about their support for Israel, knowing perfectly well that this support amounted to a dual loyalty. What could it mean to be a Zionist in the United States after 1947, if not allegiance to a foreign power? It was only after the Six-Day War of 1967 that American Jews began to support Israel more actively and openly. Many American Jews could recognize themselves in Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s comment that until June 1967, “I had not known how Jewish I was.”508
There were two reasons for this change of mind. First, Zionist control of the press had become such that American public opinion was easily persuaded that Israel had been the victim and not the aggressor in the Six-Day War. The mainstream media took seriously the statement of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to the Knesset on June 12, 1967, that “the existence of the State of Israel was hanging by a thread, but the hopes of the Arab leaders to exterminate Israel have been wiped out.”509 Israel’s victory was a divine miracle, according to the storytelling propagated in the United States. It was pure propaganda, as several Israeli ministers and high-ranking officials later disclosed: “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it,” confided chief of staff and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (Le Monde, February 28, 1968). “The claim that the danger of genocide was hanging over our heads in June 1967, and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence was only a bluff,” revealed General Matetiyahu Peled, head of the logistics command (Le Monde, June 3, 1972).510
Secondly, after 1967, the crushing deployment of Israeli power against Egypt, a nation supported diplomatically by the USSR, enabled the Johnson administration to elevate Israel to a strategic asset in the Cold War. “For American Jewish elites, Israel’s subordination to US power was a windfall,” Norman Finkelstein explains. “Jews now stood on the front lines defending America—indeed, ‘Western civilization’—against the retrograde Arab hordes. Whereas before 1967 Israel conjured the bogey of dual loyalty, it now connoted super-loyalty. […] After the 1967 war, Israel’s military élan could be celebrated because its guns pointed in the right direction—against America’s enemies. Its martial prowess might even facilitate entry into the inner sanctums of American power.” Therefore “After the June war, mainstream American Jewish organizations worked full time to firm up the American-Israeli alliance.”511 The New York Times and The Washington Post, which until then had remained relatively restrained, became openly pro-Israel.
From Yahweh to Zion Page 36
