4th January 1998

Kennedy: clan conspiracy?

Thirty four years af ter his death John Fitzgerald Kennedy's spirit lives on returning to centre stage on November 22 each year, as the media turns the thoughts of the world back to the events of that day in 1963, etched indelibly in popular memory.

Although later research and disclosures have revealed a very different man to the picture of youthful hope and promise that thousands of Americans instinctively responded to, the Kennedy mystique remains largely intact. The interest in the man and his life continues to inspire several bodies of work, trying to find and define the real Kennedy behind the hyperbole and the calumny.

But the interest in Kennedy's life, as many point out, stems from an interest in his death, or rather that air of conspiracy that still enshrouds it nearly three-and a-half decades after the event.

At regular intervals, since the day the 35th President of the United States was assassinated, books, films, essays and articles have appeared, espousing one theory or the other, trying to put together the many disparate pieces that make the mystery of his controversial death.

Several film makers, including Oliver Stone with JFK, and authors, have sought to find the answers for themselves with films and books focusing on the event.

The outcome of all this attention has been that most people, rightly or wrongly, are convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald was not capable of planning and carrying out such an operation unaided, if at all he was involved.

Somewhere along the way a massive cover up took place in which the Establishment actively participated.

Fuelling these contentions is a mass of unanswered queries. Was there one gunman, or two, or three? Were shots fired from the grassy knoll? Why were security considerations ignored and a slow circuitous route chosen for the motorcade? Was Kennedy's body in the casket that arrived in Washington aboard Air Force One?

Not that theories attempting to answer these are lacking. Almost everyone, from Dallas police officers and doctors to ambulance drivers and unwitting witnesses of the assassination, seems to have come forward with information on what they consider is the truth. Everyone, that is, except the Kennedy family themselves.

Whatever his personal equations with Lyndon Johnson and Edgar Hoover, Robert Kennedy was Attorney General of the United States when his brother was killed. Although soon relieved of that position, he lived on for nearly five years before becoming another assassin's victim while reaching for the Presidency, but said not a word about the Warren Commission's findings which maintained that Oswald had been acting alone and unaided.

If Robert Kennedy had his reasons for remaining silent, they appear to have been shared by his family. A powerful clan, often likened to royalty, the Kennedys are no minnows. Following the example set by patriarch Joseph, they have through the exercise of power, born of wealth and political clout, swayed almost every unfavourable tide.

Even today the American media is happy focusing on their doings, following John Junior's fortunes as husband and editor.

All of which make the studiously ignored point of the Kennedy family's silence all the more intriguing. In Oliver Stone's JFK a character dies, refuting the conspiracy theory, and asks "Why didn't Bobby Kennedy prosecute?"

Perhaps the government of the time feared a frenzied public backlash if a conspiracy was admitted. And so, to allay suspicion and soothe frayed nerves, they carried out an elaborate exercise and blamed Lee Harvey Oswald. If this is true, and Robert Kennedy shared the desire to prevent civil unrest, it could explain his silence in the days after the assassination. But today with public interest in no way abated, these considered actions clearly do not hold any longer. America has seen several Presidents come and go and has emerged from the Cold War with no serious rivals to its superpower status. Why, then, has the veil not been lifted altogether? The answer to that, like the answers to all else, may never ever really be known.

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