Edward Kennedy and the Assassination

[Pat Speer]

Pat, I like you and don't want to offend you but maybe an answer to your statistic is that right-wingers are more intelligent or at least more risk averse.

Don't remember the details but wasn't JFK flying under bad conditions or without adequate training for instrument only flying?  I seem to recall statements after his crash that like many Kennedys he was a risk-taker.

It may make sense.  Presumably conservatives by their very nature may be less likely to take chances.  As a group conservatives may be less adventuresome.  If more liberals are mountain climbers it makes sense that liberals will constitute a disproportionate number of moutain climbing deaths.  It might also be that the rich conservatives had more access to larger corporate jets.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

While I don't necessarily believe it's true that liberals take more chances when flying small planes, you do raise a valid point. Any kind of statistical imbalance can be due to unseen factors, i.e. riskier behavior, crappier equipment, instead of foul play. A year or so back I came across an amazing statistic, that I've been meaning to thoroughly investigate but haven't quite made it back to. While there have been something like 7 Senators die in office in the last 25 years, in an 18 month period leading up to LBJ's becoming Master of the Senate 9 died in office. 9 dead Senators in 18 months or so out of only 96! Even more amazing, as a result of these deaths, the ruling party in the Senate changed from Repub to Dem to Repub to Dem, with the Dems barely holding on while JFK was in the hospital on death's door, and with LBJ suffering a heart attack as soon as he gained control. This made me suspect the two parties were killing each other, poisoning off old men (and some not so old--one Senator killed himself when his son was exposed as a homosexual, and another died suddenly at a fairly young age--to be replaced iby Prescott Bush), in order to establish control. This was right in the middle of the cold war, mind you. Anyhow, while it's worth looking into, the nature of health care fifty years ago was such that people didn't have as much notice when they were gonna die, and the nature of politics was that Senators were older and more distinguished than most of those today. So it's quite possible the 9 dead were just a freak of history.

[Tim Gratz]

Was Strom Thurmond's longevity related to his switch in party affiliations?

Just kidding, of course!

[Dawn Meredith]

[Don't remember the details but wasn't JFK flying under bad conditions or without adequate training for instrument only flying? I seem to recall statements after his crash that like many Kennedys he was a risk-taker.

_________________

Those are just some of the made up things about 7/19/99. Just Google "murder of JFK Jr".

Wellstone was NOt going to be "beat at the polls".

Accidents do occur, of course, but from the study I have made of the abouve deaths I do not believe these were accidents but political murders.

Jackie correctly observed before her marriage to Ari that in the US "they're killing Kennedy's and (my) children are next".

Dawn

[John Geraghty]

I have been reading the book 'The Senator' by former Ted Kennedy aid Richard Burke. Naturally I was interested to read his impressions on the Kennedy families stance on the assassination, I found what he had to say quite interesting.

'Judith Exner's story brought back the entire controversy concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. It now appeared that Giancana had been recruited by the CIA to assist with various plots against Castro, and the whole thing smelled very suspicious. Congress held extensive hearings on the subject. The Senator had his own team of investigators nose into the story, and he studied their reports carefully, but he kept his own counsel. Using his own investigators, however, was interpreted by some of us as an expression of less than full confidence in the official reports. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Senator still had questions. In public, he held to the family's traditional response concerning a possible assassination plot: that there had been a proper investigation and that they supported the conclusions of the Warren Report.

Through private conversations over the years, I knew that several of the children had different opinions. Joe Kennedy tended toward the conspiracy theory, and he believed that whatever group was responsible for the death of the president had also killed his own father, Robert'

Richard E. Burke, The Senator, My ten years with Ted Kennedy, (1992, New York) pp 82-83

A very telling passage from the book.

If anyone comes across the thread of David Talbots new book, can they post the link here so that I can post this information there.

John Geraghty