What Did Teddy Know About JFK's Assassination?

Melinda, I'm as curious as you are to read what Ted Kennedy writes about poor Mary Jo, but I am more excited that "True Compass," the late senator's memoir, will tell us what Teddy ultimately came to believe about the violence that plagued his family and its dark source. As the last surviving son, Teddy was forced at 36 to become patriarch and guardian of its legacy and, like his two older brothers, ascended to his ranking position encumbered by his father's secrets.

Historians and conspiracy theorists have endlessly disputed whether JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was working for organized crime, had connections to Castro for Cuba, was a renegade CIA agent or was connected to a larger political-bureaucratic-criminal coalition. What is indisputable is that the Kennedys' fates were inextricably tied to the powerful enemies they had wittingly and unwittingly made.

The Kennedy clan was accustomed to tragedy but the greatest catastrophe of the dynasty may have begun not with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963 but by the debilitating stroke of dynasty founder Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. on Dec. 19, 1961. Once stricken, Joe Kennedy, a bootlegger who ascended to ambassador to the Court of St. James for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lost his ability to impart crucial information to his sons -- information that might have saved both of their lives.

As I wrote with my co-author, Roger Morris, in "The Money and the Power," Kennedy, Sr. lost his ability to speak with the stroke and was forced to watch silently as his two sons, the U.S. president and U.S. attorney general, relentlessly pursued organized crime.

Bobby Kennedy's legendary organized crime section of the U.S. Justice Department had a full court press against various mob figures who -- apparently unbeknownst to the Kennedy sons -- had longstanding business ties to their father. The mobsters upon whom Joe had relied to help with JFK's nomination and election were just the sort of people who are known to resent feeling double-crossed.

JFK assassination expert Gerald Posner wrote recently in the Daily Beast that, "Teddy had initially suspected the Mob in Jack's death. But when Bobby concluded quietly that it was Oswald alone, he [Teddy] followed suit." Grief-stricken at the loss of his brother, and perhaps guilt-ridden as well, Bobby Kennedy became strangely and uncharacteristically silent on the matter.

Ted Kennedy's memoir may tell us he came to suspect his surviving brother knew more than he was saying. The book is not yet available for sale (though as Emily noted it is already a best seller) but the New York Times has peeked under the embargo and reports the author, who was buried last week only steps from both slain brothers, wrote that Bobby's reaction "veered close to being a tragedy within a tragedy." He apparently writes he was satisfied with the results of the Warren Commission.

Bobby also may have considered the possibility that the president's death was related to Kennedy administration attempts to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro. According to investigative journalist Gus Russo, Bobby Kennedy was personally scheming to kill Castro and return Cuba to U.S. control. What had happened to JFK on Nov. 22, 1963 -- his murder in broad daylight on the street of an American city -- was exactly what Bobby Kennedy and others in the Kennedy administration were planning for the streets of Havana. JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, repeatedly confided in friends that the Kennedy brothers were running "a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean." "I found out something I never knew," Bobby Kennedy said shortly before his own murder. "I found out my world was not the real world."

But those family secrets, and that history, died when Bobby was gunned down in June 1968. Teddy was conspicuously silent, nearly a decade later, when Idaho Sen. Frank Church and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities investigated theories connecting the JFK assassination to the CIA attempts on Castro. Maybe his memoir will finally tell us what he thought about that, too.