Fred Litwin
- Jul 26
- 6 min read

RFK Jr. Disrespects the Memory of his Father

I've already blogged about how RFK Jr. misquoted JFK.

In this video, RFK Jr. talked about the assassination and his father with Russell Brand. It’s a good example of how he uses three quotes attributed to his father to support his own current conclusion that the CIA was behind his uncle's assassination. Unfortunately, the quotes are not even solid evidence of RFK’s initial instinct, much less evidence that RFK had a basis for that instinct, as Mark Allen has concisely and effectively pointed out in this new article.

Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (19:05)

RFK Jr.: My father's initial reaction when his brother was killed, the first call that he made was to the CIA desk officer in Langley. And he said, and he said, "did your people do this?" Then he called up, the next call was Harry Ruiz, who is a Cuban refugee who I knew well who was a constant fixture in our household. He had been at the Bay of Pigs. He had fought side-by-side with Castro in the Sierra Maes - you know, after they all came back from Mexico, he was an engineer, he'd been very close to Castro and then turned on Castro when Castro went communist. He was a very close friend of my father's and by the way, I've talked extensively with Castro about this, all this stuff, too. Oh, my father called Harry Ruiz, and said to Harry Ruiz, "did your people do this?" meaning the Cubans, because the Cubans, at that time, had turned on my father, my family and hated them and felt they were traitors because they had not rescued them at the beach. And because they had ended the raids of Alpha 66 and the other groups that were raiding Cuba all the time. So, the Cubans were very angry at my parents, my father thought, and they were all linked with the CIA. My father thought maybe that the CIA had done it, maybe using Cubans. And then a third conversation he had that morning -- I had been brought home from Sidwell Friends School when my uncle was shot. And I arrived at the same time John McCone arrived at my house, who was the director of the CIA at that time, and my father brought him for a walk in the yard and said the same thing to him, "Was it the CIA who did this to Jack?" So, you know, my father's first instinct, which was a good instinct, turns out, was that the CIA had killed his brother.

JFK assassination researcher Mark Allen has written a terrific article in the July 7th issue of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune debunking RFK Jr.'s stories about his father.

Here is a link to the Haynes Johnson article in the Washington Post which is the source of the Harry Ruiz story:

Now I was to meet one of those friends, with whom I had been working so closely, to celebrate the end of the project. He, in turn, as one of the Cuban leaders of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the closest such person to the administration, had reached an important point. That afternoon he participated in the most crucial of a series of secret meetings with top-level CIA and governmental people about what he always called "the problem of Cuba." The meeting was terminated abruptly. That's how Harry heard the news, as I did over my car radio driving back into Washington. With the world suddenly turned upside down, we both headed to the Ebbitt to keep our now numbing rendezvous, Harry arriving before me.

When I got to his small, sparsely furnished room, I put in a call to the attorney general of the United States, with whom I also had become close during the same period. Robert Kennedy was utterly in control of his emotions when he came on the line, and sounded almost studiedly brisk as he said:

"One of your guys did it."

I had been working at The Evening Star and as I stumbled out of the Ebbitt lobby my overpowering instinct was to get back to "my" paper and write something. Since I was still on leave, I had no paper and no outlet for expression. I don't think I have ever felt so frustrated and empty as when I bought a copy of The Star's extra with the bold black banner headlines reporting the news from Dallas. I was shaken by that news and by what Robert Kennedy had said to me. (He was wrong, as it turned out. In those early minutes of confusion after the assassination, apparently the first report he received, whether from the FBI or Secret Service I never knew and never asked, had identified Lee Harvey Oswald as being involved with the anti-Castro Cuban group.)

In another article, Johnson elaborated on the story:

Months later, in Washington, the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963: I had arranged to meet the same Cuban at the Ebbitt, the small, modest tourist hotel on H Street where the CIA used to place the Cubans. He had just come back from a meeting with high U.S. officials on, as he always said, "the problem of Cuba." There, we learned of the Kennedy assassination. He was told by Robert Kennedy, in a phone conversation, that "one of your guys did it" -- a mistake that grew out of the confusing early reports the attorney general was then receiving about Lee Harvey Oswald's Cuban connections.

The story about John McCone comes from the oral history of Walter Sheridan:

Sheridan: I think he was. I think he believed [William] Gurvich that [Jim] Garrison had nothing. I don’t know what he himself really thought about the whole thing. I was always reluctant to talk to him about it. I think his basic feeling was that John Kennedy was dead and it didn’t really matter. But one thing he said that was interesting was sometime during the Garrison thing, and I think it was about this time when I was bringing Gurvich up, because of course Garrison kept getting into the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] involvement. One time he said to me, he said, “You know, at the time I asked Dulles [Allen W. Dulles] if he killed my brother, or if they had killed my brother and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.” It wasn’t quite that blunt but it was pretty blunt. What he was saying was that he had looked into that possibility and was satisfied himself that they weren’t involved.

Sheridan's story is about Allen Dulles and not John McCone. However, Mark Allen contacted the New York Public Library and received some documents from their Arthur Schlesinger collection. In 1977, Schlesinger wrote Walter Sheridan thanking him for letting him look and use excerpts from his oral history:

Sheridan corrected this part of his interview:

On December 5, 1963, Schlesinger brought up the topic of the assassination with RFK:

RFK suspected, according to Schlesinger, Castro or the mob. He did not mention the CIA.

David Belin, a former counsel with the Warren Commission and Executive Director of the Rockefeller Commission, spoke to John McCone about RFK. Here is an excerpt from his 1988 book Final Disclosure: The Full Truth About the Assassination of President Kennedy: (page 217)

RFK Jr. has the story wrong. RFK was not concerned about the CIA, but about possible blowback from the various plots against Castro.

Allen also mentions that there were warm feelings between the Kennedys and Allen Dulles. In fact, Robert Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson to appoint Dulles to the Warren Commission. RFK had some warm words about Dulles in his oral history, Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words -- The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years.

Here is an excerpt from page 14: