David Talbot's Brothers

Over the years I have read a great many histories of the Kennedy assassination, and indeed of the Kennedy presidency. It has become a trite thing to call John and Robert Kennedy Graachi since Ted White first recalled his Boston Grammar schooling by doing so. Yet they did represent a turn not taken, and regretted, by the American republic. For all their flaws, they were amongst the best of the mid-twentieth century, and had they lived, the world would today have been much better.

So I looked forward to reading David Talbot's best-selling work, Brothers, to which I had treated myself. The book takes the eminently sensible line that Robert Kennedy suspected that one of his many campaigns--against Fidel Castro, or the mob, or corrupt Trade Unionists like Jimmy Hoffa, or the CIA--had resulted in his brother's assassination. It is predicated upon the sensible possibility that the man who had been Attorney-General in the Kennedy administration knew of Lee Harvey Oswald's existence before Dallas, and that RFK saw in the numerous post Dallas cover-ups a sinister agenda.

I was disappointed that Talbot could not follow through his thesis without repeating demonstrably untrue and illogical accretions to the Kennedy assassination story which have developed since November 22 1963.

It is, for instance, not only more than possible, but absolutely required, that one bullet struck Kennedy and Governor Connally in front of him. It is now established, though not beyond doubt, that Kennedy was struck by a bullet from Oswald's gun, which Oswald owned and which Oswald had been photographed with. I think that Vincent Bugliosi has exhaustively shown how Jack Ruby was motivated by a very peculiar cocktail of ideas in killing Oswald, and how the shooting from the sixth floor window was exactly where a sharpshooter like Oswald would have shot from. Some disagree.

I spent a while chatting with someone on an Oxford alumni course one summer--very relaxed affairs I used to lecture at in Rewley House full of curious millionaires--who knew Jack Ruby. He told me over lunch that he believed that Ruby had just killed Oswald for the sake of it, given what he knew. I also met genuinely dangerous Cubans who'd claimed to have attacked cesar Chavez once, when I had lunch with some bishops in Washington DC, where I was researching and living with white friars. They told me in absolute terms that they hated the Kennedys, but had never heard of anyone who claimed with conviction to have shot them.

I am also convinced by the small details that were previously disputed. Oswald shot at an ascending, not a descending target, given the topography of Dealey Plaza; the jet effect would have blown the trussed and corseted Kennedy back and to the left in the direction of any bullet; Oswald could easily have gotten downstairs quickly without notice.

The most frustrating thing about Talbot's book is that he acknowledges none of these points whilst coming up with some real gems. I suppose that is a feature of the very fine writing on Salon.com, with the creation of which he is deeply associated. For instance, Talbot traced a second-hand admission by prominent CIA chief David Atlee Phillips that he was in Dallas that day, and tentatively notes a novel written by the same in which Phillips wrote the line 'Oswald took the anti-Castro plan and turned it against us'. Phillips, of course, featured in the investigations in the nineteen seventies by Congress that suggested a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but I think on the wrong interpretation of the evidence.

Talbot also notes the desperate and verifiable CIA cover-up of the assassination, I suppose in case it was involved, and the existence of other plots against Kennedy, which it may have had a hand in and with which Howard Hunt may have become confused.

Why, however, does Talbot have to praise the fictional account put forward as fact by Oliver Stone in JFK-- a great film and lousy history? Or to traduce Lyndon Johnson? Or to pretend not to know about modern acoustic analysis both of Dealey Plaza and of police dictaphone tapes that suggest that there were no shots from the grassy knoll? Or to constantly draw anachronistic comparisons with the 2000 election or the Iraq war?

There is something deeply wrong with the rage and self-pity that has characterised the American right in the decades since 1963. The left-wing response of conspiracism and neurosis on a Dreyfus scale has not been particularly admirable either. That both existed has been brought out by this beautifully written but infuriating conspiracy book.

If I were you, and interested in the case, however, I would suggest that you go and buy the Bugliosi book and then think about the issues neither raise but which may be explanatory, such as the possibility of a confusion between Tippet's body and Kennedy's. Or RFK's appropriation of his brother's cranial material. Or the way Jim Garrison never ever investigated the mafia, or the Dreyfus-case obsession that drove lunacies like the exhumation of Oswald.

Then, you should remember Robert Kennedy's advice. The question is not 'what if?' ; It is 'what now?' Endless cycles of retreat, to use Adam Walinsky's phrase, may well have been experienced since the tragedies of Dallas, Memphis, Los Angeles, and for that matter the Audobon Ballroom; but defeat stops when people start looking at the task in hand, and then ahead.

For all of that, Talbot's book is tremendously diverting, and scathing about the American press. It's just that it could have been much better. How many candidates and policies could we have said that about in the forty years since Nixon's election?

UPDATE: Conspiracy is endemic to American politics. I was directed to this report of the company Al Smith (a great 1928 candidate) kept in the 30s by Martin Kelly's excellent blog. It details the Maguire coup plot of 1934, a very real plot at a time when Fu Manchu was planning his fictional one.