Critics of the Warren Report's lone-assassin conclusion were often stumped by defenders of the report with the question, "If there was a conspiracy, why didn't President Kennedy's own brother -- the attorney general of the United States, Robert Kennedy -- do anything about it?" It's true that, at least until shortly before his assassination in June 1968, Bobby Kennedy publicly supported the Warren Report. On March 25, during a presidential campaign rally at San Fernando Valley State College in California, Kennedy was dramatically confronted by a woman heckler, who called out, "We want to know who killed President Kennedy!" Kennedy responded by saying, "I stand by the Warren Commission Report." But at a later campaign appearance, days before his assassination, Bobby Kennedy said the opposite, according to his former press spokesman Frank Mankiewicz. When asked if he would reopen the investigation into his brother's death, he uttered a simple, one-word answer: "Yes." Mankiewicz recalls today, "I remember that I was stunned by the answer. It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down the questioning -- you know, 'Yes, now let's move on.'"

His public statements on the Warren Report were obviously freighted with political and emotional -- and perhaps even security -- concerns for Bobby Kennedy. But we have no doubt what his private opinion of the report was -- as his biographer Evan Thomas wrote, Kennedy "regarded the Warren Commission as a public relations exercise to reassure the public." According to a variety of reports, Kennedy suspected a plot as soon as he heard his brother had been shot in Dallas. And as he made calls and inquiries in the hours and days after the assassination, he came to an ominous conclusion: JFK was the victim of a domestic political conspiracy.

In a remarkable passage in "One Hell of a Gamble," a widely praised 1997 history of the Cuban missile crisis based on declassified Soviet and U.S. government documents, historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali wrote that on Nov. 29, one week after the assassination, Bobby Kennedy dispatched a close family friend named William Walton to Moscow with a remarkable message for Georgi Bolshakov, the KGB agent he had come to trust during the nerve-wracking back-channel discussions sparked by the missile crisis. According to the historians, Walton told Bolshakov that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed "there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald's rifle" and "that Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime." The Kennedys also sought to reassure the Soviets that despite Oswald's apparent connections to the communist world, they believed President Kennedy had been killed by American enemies. This is a stunning account -- with the fallen president's brother and widow communicating their chilling suspicions to the preeminent world rival of the U.S. -- and it has not received nearly the public attention it deserves.

Both Khrushchev, who had been working with JFK to ease tensions between the superpowers, and his spy chief shared Kennedy's dark view of the assassination. KGB chairman reacted incredulously to the news that Oswald, a man whom his agency had closely monitored after he defected to the Soviet Union, was the culprit: "I thought that this man could not possibly be the mastermind of the crime." And according to Fursenko and Naftali, "Intelligence coming to Khrushchev in the weeks following the assassination seemed to confirm the theory that a right-wing conspiracy had killed Kennedy." This assessment was shared by the governments of Cuba, Mexico and France, where President DeGaulle, when briefed by a reporter on the lone-nut theory reacted with Gallic skepticism, laughing, "Vous me blaguez! [You're kidding me.] Cowboys and Indians!"

In the years after his brother's death, Bobby Kennedy was overwhelmed by grief. But the common perception that he found it too painful to focus on the assassination is belied by the fact that Kennedy maintained a searching curiosity about critics of the Warren Report, using surrogates like Mankiewicz, Walter Sheridan, Ed Guthman and John Siegenthaler to check out their work and dispatching his former aides to New Orleans to evaluate Jim Garrison's investigation. In fact Kennedy himself phoned New Orleans coroner Nicholas Chetta at his home after the death of key Garrison suspect David Ferrie to question Chetta about his autopsy report. And while Sheridan -- a trusted friend of Kennedy's who had worked closely with him on his Jimmy Hoffa investigation -- famously repudiated Garrison in a 1967 documentary for NBC, RFK apparently still kept ties to the Garrison camp. According to William Turner, a former FBI agent who worked as a Garrison investigator during the Kennedy case, in April 1968 he received a call in the New Orleans prosecutor's office from an RFK campaign aide named Richard Lubic. "He said, 'Bill, Bobby's going to go -- he's going to reopen the investigation after he wins.' I went in immediately and told Jim [Garrison]. He didn't seem surprised."

Bobby was not the only member of President Kennedy's inner circle who believed there was a conspiracy. Presidential aides Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers, key members of JFK's Irish Mafia, were in a trailing limousine in the Dallas motorcade. Both of them later told House Speaker Tip O'Neill that they heard two shots from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. "That's not what you told the Warren Commission," a stunned O'Neill replied, according to his 1989 memoir, "Man of the House. "You're right," O'Donnell said. "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things." So not wanting to "stir up more pain and trouble for the family," O'Donnell told the commission what the FBI wanted him to.

Speaking of the FBI, its deeply sinister strongman J. Edgar Hoover might have "lied his eyes out" to the Warren Commission, as panel member Hale Boggs, the Louisiana congressman, memorably told an aide, pressuring and maneuvering the commission to reach a lone-assassin verdict. But again, in private, Hoover told another story. The summer after the assassination, Hoover was relaxing at the Del Charro resort in California, which was owned by his friend, right-wing Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison. Another Texas oil crony of Hoover's, Billy Byars Sr. -- the only man Hoover had called on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, besides Robert Kennedy and the head of the Secret Service -- also was there. At one point, according to Anthony Summers, the invaluable prober of the dark side of American power, Byars' teenage son, Billy Jr., got up his nerve to ask Hoover the question, "Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald did it?" According to Byars, Hoover "stopped and looked at me for quite a long time. Then he said, 'If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.'"

Blunt skepticism about the Warren Report was a bipartisan affair, with leaders on both sides of the aisle airily dismissing its conclusions. On a White House tape recording, President Nixon is heard telling aides that the Warren Report "was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated." One of Nixon's top aides, White House chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, shared his boss' skepticism. In his 1978 memoir, "The Ends of Power," Haldeman, who "had always been intrigued with the conflicting theories of the assassination," recalls that when the Nixon team moved into the White House in 1969, he felt that they finally "would be in a position to get all the facts." But Nixon, perhaps wary of where all those facts would lead, rejected Haldeman's suggestion.

According to Haldeman, Nixon did play the assassination card in a mysterious way against CIA director Richard Helms, long regarded by Warren Report critics to have some connection to the gunshots in Dallas. Seeking to pressure the CIA into helping him out of his Watergate mess, Nixon had Haldeman deliver this cryptic message -- apparently a threat -- to Helms: "The president asked me to tell you this entire (Watergate) affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown." This prompted an explosive reaction from the spymaster: "Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting, 'The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.'" Haldeman speculates that "Bay of Pigs" must have been Nixon's code for something related to the CIA, Castro and the Kennedy assassination. But whatever dark card Nixon had played, it worked. Haldeman reported back to his boss that the CIA director was now "very happy to be helpful."

Nixon was not willing to publicly reopen the box of assassination demons. But many of them began flying out when the Church Committee started investigating CIA abuses in the 1970s, including the unholy pact between the agency and the Mafia to eliminate Fidel Castro. (The bombshell headlines produced by the Church Committee would, in fact, lead to the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977.)

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