After squeaking by Richard Nixon in the election of 1960, John F. Kennedy set forth new challenges for the United States. In his inauguration speech, he challenged his fellow Americans to "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
Kennedy surviving an assassination attempt in Dallas, Texas, there needs to be a link to a plausible and factual observation made prior to the counterfactual construct (Gilley, 224).
He saw Kennedy struck in the back by the second shot, and then in the head by the third bullet.
The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy happened only one way, and the die had already been cast by the time the Zapruder film begins at frame 133.
Less than three months later, Mankiewicz stood outside a Los Angeles hospital, breaking the news to the media that Bobby was dead, another Kennedy victim of another senseless, history-shifting assassination.
We may never know who or what forces were responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy. But if the goal had been to neutralize Robert F. Kennedy, those shots in Dallas could scarcely have been more effective.
In the time that Bobby had been overseeing his brother’s so-called Special Group team on Cuba, he had come to appreciate just how ungovernable the Cuban exile community could be. It hadn’t taken long on Nov. 22 for speculation to focus on the possible involvement of Fidel Castro, given the Kennedy administration’s repeated attempts to oust or assassinate the Communist leader. That speculation only intensified after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, whose record of pro-Castro agitation quickly came to light. Yet it’s intriguing that Bobby’s suspicion of possible Cuban involvement seemed to focus squarely on the anti-Castro crowd.
Hart said in a recent interview that he remains flabbergasted by US law enforcement’s lack of interest in solving those two grisly murders. “You had a new set of suspects — those who had motives to be angry at John and Robert Kennedy. When you think about that for 10 seconds, the implications are pretty huge,” Hart said, adding, “If you can find out who killed Rosselli and Giancana, you may have an answer to the mystery of the century.”
As for Giancana, he was expected to testify in 1975 before a Senate subcommittee co-chaired by Gary Hart of Colorado. Established to investigate the JFK assassination, the subcommittee was the first official body to openly question the lone-gunman narrative of the Warren Commission. But before Giancana could appear, his bullet-riddled body was found in his basement in suburban Chicago. The dismembered body of another mob witness, Boston-born Johnny Rosselli, was found in a drum floating off Florida, after he had testified in front of Hart’s panel.
But, according to an oral history that Sheridan would eventually give to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Sheridan later informed Bobby that Hoffa had been at a restaurant when he learned JFK had been shot. The reaction of the pugnacious labor leader was unlike that of most other Americans. “He got up on the table,” Sheridan said, “and cheered.”
Bobby Kennedy had once been such a rabid anti-Communist that he’d worked for Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yet just one week after his brother’s assassination, he sent Kennedy loyalist William Walton on a secret mission to Moscow to deliver a stunning message to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Bobby, the loyalist reported, believed that Oswald had not acted alone, according to long-concealed Soviet documents detailed in the book “One Hell of a Gamble” by historians Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko. And, he reported, the attorney general believed that domestic hard-liners, rather than foreign agents, were responsible.
The assassination, in fact, was becoming “fused with one representation, so much so that Kennedy’s death became virtually unimaginable without Zapruder’s film,” as the critic Richard B.
In each, one of the bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald fatally hit Kennedy in the head; another struck and passed through the president before hitting Texas John Connally; and the third shot fired by Oswald…well, the commission could not say where that bullet went or even when it was fired.
It is all a matter of speculation, but there could have been a very practical explanation for a more circuitous path. If Bobby had been assassinated, historians point out, his brother could have been expected to marshal every ounce of his prodigious federal power to exact revenge on the murderers and their benefactors. And because the victim would not just be the country’s crusading attorney general but also the president’s brother, the public would have surely given Jack Kennedy a blank check of support for a crackdown on whatever dark forces he determined were responsible.