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JFK himself said, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, unrealistic." Even President Kennedy would have acknowledged that there was a shadowy side to his presidency -- it's what led to his assassination. Congratulations to David Talbot for writing this book while it was still possible.

Here's an interesting what-if? If Kennedy had been shot at in Dallas, but they had missed, his survival would hardly have ushered in the peaceful alternative writers love to talk about. In truth, JFK and RFK would have been obsessed with the very issues that Talbot talks about -- who tried to hit him and why? And, with JFK still alive, RFK would have been put on point to protect the president both physically and from investigations. But the investigations would have come anyway, and the myth of Camelot would have been lost.

If they'd missed in Dallas, John Kennedy would have ended up impeached and nothing his Attorney General could do would have stopped it.

Bryce Zabel

Dear David Talbot,

Yes. RFK and JFK matter. Like you I worked in the RFK Presidential Campaign in Los Angeles. I was 22 when I started

and turned 23 at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968. Our group, The Sounds of Time, was the So.Calif. advance singing group and we often sang for hours preceding RFK. I remember him talking about ending the war and the crowd would often ask

him about his brothers assassination. He said he needed to get into the White House to resolve the issue.

I was the last person to speak with Robert Kennedy as he made his way up to the stage. I told him I would meet him in the White House and he smiled. He was always gracious. There were some disturbing occurances that night but I will save that for another time. America's heart was broken by events in the 60's and we now have an imbicile surrounded by constitution wreckers and America needs to wake up fast.

As fate would have it my birthday coincided with the Arab Israeli War of 1967. Someone was listening to the Kennedy-Mccarthy Debate and used it to strike down our candidate.

I do not believe there were any safe exits out of that hotel.

Sen. Kennedy was supposed to go downstairs to the ballroom below but he went into the kitchen instead. The Ace Security guards were not functioning properly and one even told me that RFK was going to be O.K. with just a slight wound to the leg.

At the same time he would not let me back into the kitchen

where he had been stationed that night.

The rest for another day.

Leon

This is part of something I wrote a while ago.

The political debate in this country has become a badly worn fabric. For the past seventy years our national domestic political discussion has swung between just two poles. On the one side we have had the social safety net federalism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, while on the other, growing out of furious right wing opposition to the New Deal (in all its manifestations), what might be summed up in terms of its persistent, pervasive (and self serving) sub-text: the government is the great Satan.

By the 1960’s the New Deal had run its course. John Kennedy realized this and was known to privately tweak old line New Deal politicians for being old hat. I seem to recall that no less than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would then defend Kennedy to Liberals as having made a criticism of style rather than substance. But this was a moment in time when a criticism of style was a criticism of substance. We needed to move on to something new. We sensed it, and in Kennedy, with his youth, grace, energy and wit, we found someone looking to lead us in new directions (the New Frontier), even if neither of us knew just what those directions might be. For a short time he helped kindle within us a belief that we would discover a stance appropriate to, and fruitful in, the second half of the twentieth century. When he was killed, it all went away. Johnson, seemingly, led us back to the 1930’s and, ultimately, we arrived at Reagan and a temporary mooring around the second of our two poles. So, for the last seventy years we have been governed by two mind sets, formed in the 1930’s, and, since the 1960’s, persistently skew to our reality.

The problem for both parties has become how to disenthrall themselves from their fixations

I, too, was captivated by RFK's campaign, and liberalism was severely wounded that year, with the deaths of Bobby and MLK. There's film of crowds standing by the train carrying his body back to Washington that is the saddest elegy I know of.

Yet the other, tougher Bobby remains as well. The Bobby who ran the assassination attempts at Castro, for instance. Isn't that odd, to have the Attorney General acting as case officer here? Who did he contract with?

One of the assassination theories that float around are the "mob backlash" theory. Or the CIA theory, almost certainly wrong. But a recent book by Joe Trento, "The Secret History of the CIA" raises another prospect: that it was Russia all along, and that the real target of the assassination wasn't Kennedy, but Khruschev, who was toppled soon after Kennedy died, because his bond with Kennedy was his strongest point.

Once again, an interesting theory. But the true facts of both Kennedy's murders will never be known unless somebody spills the beans; and the beans he spills will certainly depend on which side his rice is buttered on.

I was a staunch admirer of John and Robert Kennedy, especially Bobby Kennedy. When JFK was assasisnated, I didn't believe in the conspiracy theory. I was in my senior year of high school and tended to believe pretty much in the government line, until I started reading more. In 1968, I walked precincts on practically all of my days off from my regular job in San Francisco, leading up to the California primary. I felt very inspired by Bobby. He planned to get us out of Vietnam and he was very knowledgeable about what to do about helping people in our inner cities. He really cared about the poor, and he had the ability to reach out and bring people together. Were it not for him being killed, Robert Kennedy would have been nominated and elected. Regarding John Kennedy, he also would have got us out of Vietnam once he had Goldwater beaten in 1964. With the large Democratic majority in Congress, JFK would have obtained a lot more money for the anti-poverty and other domestic programs.

There were some rich folks who didn't want this kind of progress, and it was they who had the Kennedys and MLK assasisnated, and J. Edgar Hoover covered it up. It makes absolutely no sense that someone sympathetic to Cuban Primier Fidel Castro would have acted on his own in assasisnating JFK, since Castro didn't get any better benifit with Lyndon Johnson as President. It also made no sense to me from day one that Sirhan acted alone in killing Bobby Kennedy, because RFK stated his support for Israel, when all of the Presidential candidates stated their support for Israel.