Great news! Robert Kennedy Junior is running for President of the United States.
Where do you even start?
Robert Kennedy Jr. sat down with Aubrey Marcus. You have to love his description:
Aubrey Marcus (IG: @aubreymarcus) is the founder of Onnit, a globally disruptive brand based on a holistic health philosophy he calls Total Human Optimization. Onnit remains an industry leader with products optimizing millions of lives, including many top professional athletes around the world.
Here is an excerpt from a transcript from the interview: (0:40)
RFK Jr.: My uncle, when the Joint Chiefs proposed Operation Northwoods to him, which would involve killing a lot of Cuban-American civilians in Miami. They were going to plant bombs at, you know, in shopping centers, etc, in order to blame it on Castro to give us a pretense for invading Cuba. And, you know, the people who were proposing this were people like general Louis Lemitzer [sic – Lyman Lemnitzer] who was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Curtis LeMay, you know, these people who had been the stalwart, you know, heroes of World War Two. And here they were, you know, in the Oval Office, telling my uncle, you know, we're going to, we're going to kill Americans in order to create a pretense for invading Cuba, and he didn’t comment. He walked out of that meeting, in the middle of it in the middle of the presentation. And he said, I think it was to Arthur Schlesinger. But he famously said, as he was leaving, “and we call ourselves the human race.”
JFK did not say "And we call ourselves the human race" in response to a discussion about Operations Northwoods.
He was in a meeting to discuss the effects of a nuclear war. Here is an excerpt from Dean Rusk's book, As I See It:
Here is another excerpt from a transcript: (7:04)
RFK, Jr.: And when, when the Bay of Pigs occurred, what they thought, what Dulles thought is, this young president, we'd hoodwink him into allowing the Bay of Pigs invasion to happen. My uncle refused to get, allow the Navy to transport the Bay of Pigs. He didn't want the military to have anything to do with it. So how did they get over there? They took United Fruit and Standard Oil, you know, provided boats, so they could go land over there. And so when they got stuck on the beach, my uncle walks out of the meeting, and he said, I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.
Here is a good article on the boats used in the Bay of Pigs. The CIA purchased five of the cargo ships from the Cuban-owned, Miami-based Garcia Line,
There are no contemporaneous sources for the quote. All we have is a New York Times article from April 25, 1966, "C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool," by a team of correspondents including Tom Wicker, John Finney, Max Frankel, and E.W. Kenworthy.
The article noted:
"And President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he wanted "to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."
Rather than saying that Kennedy said this as he left a 1961 meeting, it would be more accurate to say that the New York Times claimed in 1966 that Kennedy had said this to a (high-ranking), (unnamed), subordinate. There is a difference.
Here is another excerpt from a transcript: (4:38)
RFK Jr.: And you know, what my uncle said, my uncle initially said to Dulles and Lemnitzer - Allen Dulles was head of the CIA -- “I don't want to, I don't think it is the place of the United States. Whatever Cuba's," at this point, there was no Russian military missiles in Cuba, it was just, we didn't like Castro. And my uncle was like, “Well, you know, he should be able to choose, they should be able to choose their own government the same way that we did.” And so, you know, my uncle said to Dulles, at that time, “we, I don't feel comfortable going into Cuba and displacing their leader, even though we don't like him.”
Robert Kennedy Jr. makes it sound like President Kennedy was against covert action against Cuba. Perhaps next RFK Jr. will be claiming that Operation Mongoose was foisted on the Kennedys against their will.
Here is what Tim Weiner, in his book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, said about John and Robert Kennedy: (page 180)
In his wrath after the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy first wanted to destroy the CIA. Then he took the agency's clandestine service out of its death spiral by handing the controls to his brother. It was one of the least wise decisions of his presidency. Robert F. Kennedy, thirty-five years old, famously ruthless, fascinated with secrecy, took command of the most sensitive covert operations of the United States. The two men unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity. Ike had undertaken 170 major CIA covert operations in eight years. The Kennedys launched 163 major covert operations in less than three.
Kennedy revamped covert action. He set up the Special Group, or the 303 Committee, to oversee the clandestine service with McGeorge Bundy as its chairman: (page 181)
The members were McCone, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and senior deputies from Defense and State. But until very late in the Kennedy administration it was left to the CIA's covert operators to decide whether to consult with the Special Group. There were more than a few operations that McCone [Director of the CIA after Dulles] and the Special Group knew little or nothing about.
In November 1961, in the greatest secrecy, John and Bobby Kennedy created a new planning cell for covert action, the Special Group (Augmented). It was RFK's outfit, and it had one mission: eliminating Castro.
The Kennedys were serious about getting rid of Castro, and they started Operation Mongoose: (page 185)
The Kennedys did not want to hear that [that the CIA had limited intelligence on Cuba]. They wanted swift, silent sabotage to overthrow Castro. "Let's get the hell on with it," the attorney general barked. "The President wants some action, right now." Helms saluted smartly and got the hell on with it. He created a new freestanding task force to report to Ed Lansdale and Robert Kennedy. He assembled a team from all over the world, creating the CIA's largest peacetime intelligence operation to date, with some six hundred CIA officers in and around Miami, almost five thousand CIA contractors, and the third largest navy in the Caribbean, including submarines, patrol boats, coast guard cutters, seaplanes, and Guantanamo Bay for a base. Some "nutty schemes" against Fidel were proposed by the Pentagon and the White House, Helms said. These included blowing up an American ship in Guantanamo Harbor and faking a terrorist attack against an American airliner to justify a new invasion.
Note the emphasis on sabotage:
The Attorney General [Robert Kennedy] opened the meeting by saying that higher authority is concerned about progress on the MONGOOSE program and feels that more priority should be given to trying to mount sabotage operations.
If all of this is an example of "scattering to the wind" then it is surely time to update the definition.
As for Operations Northwoods, the Kennedys wanted any and all ideas to get rid of Castro. Northwoods was one such plan, but was rejected.
Tim Weiner writes: (page 185)
Some "nutty schemes" against Fidel were proposed by the Pentagon and the White House, Helms said. These included blowing up an American ship in Guantanamo Harbor and faking a terrorist attack against an American airliner to justify a new invasion.
Even Fletcher Prouty got into the action:
Doesn't this sound like provocation -- "we'll be well on our way to placing the attrition level at or near the boiling point."
Since 2005, RFK, Jr. has promoted a connection between vaccines and autism, and he has since become the leading anti-vaxxer of our time. His latest book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, was a massive bestseller in the United States.
In his book, he wrote that “The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause.” And then there is this:
After twenty years of modeling exercises, the CIA—working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci and billionaire Internet tycoons—had pulled off the ultimate coup d’état: some 250 years after America’s historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarian rule, the American experiment with self-government was over. The oligarchy was restored, and these gentlemen and their spymasters had equipped the rising technocracy with new tools of control unimaginable to King George or to any other tyrant in history.
Even his wife Cheryl Hines was taken aback when he publicly compared the experience of anti-vaxxers to victims of the Holocaust: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was forced to apologize.
His propensity for conspiracy nonsense makes him unfit for any public office - and I include dogcatcher..
Related Blog Posts
Researcher Tracy Parnell covers much of the same ground with a few important links about JFK using the CIA in Laos. JFK's Views on the CIA are discussed in my new book, Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
My book dissects Oliver Stone's so-called documentary series, JFK: Destiny Betrayed. Download the Viewer's Guide (now updated) to that series.
Over the past several months, I have shown in multiple blog posts how Oliver Stone's documentary series, JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed, misleads viewers. In fact, despite months of work, there are still many more misleading segments that need to be addressed. It's no wonder that the fact checkers of Netflix nixed the airing of the films.
There is a choice between four hours of tendentious nonsense (JFK: Destiny Betrayed) and two hours (JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass). As a handy guide for viewers, here are all those posts in order of their appearance in JFK: Destiny Betrayed and JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, preceded by some general critiques.
The Viewer's Guide has now been updated to include the sources from my new book, Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
