Volume 47, Number 17 · November 2, 2000
The Interesting One
By Thomas Powers
Robert Kennedy: His Life
by Evan Thomas
Simon and Schuster, 509 pp., $28.00
On the day his brother Jack was shot to death in Dallas, Texas, Robert Kennedy asked the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John McCone, point-blank, if the CIA had been responsible for the murder. It is hard to know which is more remarkable—that Kennedy wasn't sure of the answer, or that he expected to hear the truth either way. McCone of course said no, and there is no evidence that Kennedy ever doubted him, but that only narrowed the list of suspects in his mind. There were several others: organized crime and crooked labor unions, both hounded by Kennedy as a Senate investigator before his brother's election, and as attorney general after it; Cubans opposed to Fidel Castro, and especially those Cubans who had gone onto the beach at the Bay of Pigs and been abandoned there; and Castro himself, who had been marked for death by Kennedy's government, who knew it, and who had warned that two could play at that game.
Review, 6247 words
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