David Talbot, the founder and former editor of Salon magazine, has a new book hitting the stores, Brothers, about the relationship between John and Robert Kennedy. In it, Talbot makes clear something we have used as a bedrock assumption to Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy. Namely, Robert never for a minute believed in the Warren Commission and from Day One was looking into all the possible conspirators who would want to kill his brother.
Of course, in our book, RFK doesn't look alone because he still has JFK to help him. In our telling, it's the Kennedy brothers who realize that they came "this close" to Jack Kennedy being murdered in Dallas. They set out to find out who's responsible, to punish them and, simultaneously, to keep all the secrets of the Kennedy Administration still secret. It turns out that task is simply too much to ask. All the activities and investigations take on a momentum of their own. Eventually, while searching for killers, the question must be asked and answered: Who would want to kill the popular President Kennedy and why?
Talbot begins with a scene we use in our opening chapter as well -- the fact that the attorney general was eating lunch -- clam chowder and tuna sandwiches -- with United States Attorney Robert Morgenthau and his assistant by the pool at Hickory Hill, his mansion in McLean, Virginia, outside the capital. The difference, of course, is that in our book, Bobby Kennedy gets to talk to John immediately after the attack. Here's an excerpt from Talbot's first chapter:
RFK's search for the truth about the crime of the century has long been an untold story. But it is deeply loaded with historic significance. Kennedy's investigative odyssey -- which began with a frantic zeal immediately after his brother's assassination, and then secretly continued in fitful bursts until his own murder less than five years later -- did not succeed in bringing the case to court. But Robert Kennedy was a central figure in the drama -- not only as his brother's attorney general and the second most powerful official in the Kennedy administration, but as JFK's principal emissary to the dark side of American power. And his hunt for the truth sheds a cold, bright light on the forces that he suspected were behind the murder of his brother. Bobby Kennedy was America's first assassination conspiracy theorist.
Talbot's book looks to be a terrific read. We hope ours will be, too. They're both based on the same assumption: Robert Kennedy knew that he and his brother had made significant enemies and that more than a few of them had motive to kill.
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