The Kennedy Legacy In Dallas

I got to hear live, the Charlie Rose interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and his sister, Rory, the documentary filmmaker last night in Dallas at the Winspear Opera House. It was an exceptional evening and the thought struck me through the night that the Kennedy family has been on the leading edge of change in our nation for almost eight decades.

Like them or not, the Kennedys have played a pivotal role in some of the biggest landmark moments in our country’s recent history.

Both of the young Kennedys were funny and poignant. They recalled good times and hard times that they, as a family, endured. (It is interesting they can talk about the ‘assassination’ and use that word when the city of Dallas can’t in its official commemoration of the events around November 22, 1963. It is as if on one had we want to tip our hat at history, but on the other hand to wash our hands of the act that happened on our streets. Neither of the two Kennedys suffered from the delusional etymology of estranged words for what happened here fifty years ago.)

They were full of stories about their lives, both public and private. One story recounted Robert bringing a dead salamander into the White House for his uncle Jack to see. Jack, looking at the salamander realized that young Robert did not know it was dead, so he suggested releasing the animal into one of the Rose Garden ponds.  They did, where upon the President suggested the lizard was suffering from “an acute lack of animation.”

They also discussed the intense dislike Robert had for J. Edgar Hoover (and vice versa). One time he sent his kids into Hoover’s office just to have some fun. Young Robert was caught with his hands in the fish tank in Hoover’s private office, a prize possession of the FBI director. I would love to have seen that. I am sure the young Mr. Kennedy had a folder with his name on it thereafter in the private files of the FBI’s chief.

Kennedy and Hoover were miles apart on the investigation of and prosecution against the Mafia. Hoover denied the very existence of the Mob, but rather sought out high-profile criminals and “communists” as his leading targets. Under Kennedy’s leadership as Attorney General the number of mafia cases indicted and convicted rose by two hundred fold from the times prior to his arrival at Justice. A fact that never sat well with either the FBI Director nor the mafia.

During part of the evening’s discussion Robert mentioned that his father had not believed in the Warren Commission’s findings. He had secretly conducted some of his own, only to realize that much of the Warren Commission reports were false or grossly overstated and that he believed the Mafia, the CIA and the Cubans acted together in bringing his brother down on the streets of Dallas in November 1963.

Interestingly, that’s the foundation for my book, The Man on the Grassy Knoll. I have stated on several interviews that the Warren Commission, as flawed as its findings were, did its job. That was to shore up America’s confidence in its institutions and to dissuade beliefs that outsiders (or insiders for that matter) could have plotted the death of the President. Americans didn’t want to believe we were that vulnerable. It was okay for one crazy SOB to have a rifle and to take a life at random, but to have a planned execution of a sitting President, carried out by a conspiracy of foreign and domestic forces would never serve the country well. America still suffered under the delusions of the 1950’s and wanted to believe that the institutions we had in place were there protecting us and our democracy. To that end, the Warren Commission was successful. Unfortunately, what they wrote in their final analysis, was mostly fiction.

My work in the same field and the same subject is fiction, too. My novel that is. But the research, which I built that novel upon was certainly not. You will soon be able to read about it again in a serialized format at Venture Galleries. We are going to re-release The Man on the Grassy Knoll, to help commemorate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. If you have not had a chance to read it before now, here is your chance to do so free.  I’ll post another blog as we get closer to the date of re-release.

A final thought. There is a philosophy in the Kennedy family that goes something like this: ‘go out there and do something to make the world a better place for people who aren’t as fortunate as you.’ Considering where we are in America today, I think that is a fine mantra for us all to live by.