Nullius in verba is taken to mean “take nobody's word for it.” It is an expression of the determination of Fellows of The Royal Society to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment. In this case, on the sad — tragic — anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s untimely murder (June 6, 1968), one should contemplate how and why he died and why it matters. Just like his brother. His (Bobby’s) last words were, lying on his back in a pool of his own blood: “Jack? Jack - is that you?” And he died. His brother was waiting for him there in the Shades to take him into Eternity.1
Murdered by the same “Company” that murdered his brother 5 years before. Don’t take my word for it; do your homework. Jackie (née Bouviér) said (to herself) immediately while watching RFK announce his candidacy for the U.S. Presidency on the T.V. — “They’ll kill him, too.”2 And, of course, they did. In fact, some of the same people in Dallas on November 22, 1963 were at the Ambassador Hotel that night in 1968. So was Miki Dora, if you can believe that! He was actually there; so was David Morales (aka: “El Indio”), a rather unsavory CIA “mechanic” (read: assassin) from Honduras. Not the kind of guy you want to know (anything about) A mere coincidence? There are no accidents in this Universe. None, at least, that I’m aware of. They never got the ballistics right. Nobody agrees on how many shots were fired. They were different guns, bullets in the walls and floor (and five other people) confirm as much — but, officially, there was only “one shooter.” “A Lone Assassin.” Another one . . . Worked like a charm before? If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. Sirhan Sirhan (the hapless Patsy kid they pinned it on — who remembers nothing to this day of that night’s events: Manchurian Candidate?!) was standing directly in front of Kennedy; but the shot that entered his brain (just behind the ear) and killed him came from behind him . . . Another Grassy Knoll . . . A little thing like Truth or the Evidence (much less science) is often overlooked (I should say: overcome) for the sake of convenience (dressed up as “patriotism”), at least in this country and most other corrupt, decadent Empires (aren’t they all?), where consolidation of the hegemony remains once and always the priority. That’s the Company’s mandate: “plausible deniability.” Just ask Dick Helms (he was there that night) or his boss and mentor, The Devil Himself: Allen Dulles.3 But I digress.
Bobby spoke to a crowd of mostly black people in Indianapolis just a couple months before on April 10, 1968 — the night another of our fallen heroes (Nostoi) was murdered: MLK (Martin Luther King, Jr.). Everyone — Kennedy’s handlers, the Secret Service, the police, his wife, etc. — warned him/told him NOT to go out there and speak to this crowd, which, at that point didn’t know what had happened (to MLK). But they would soon enough, from Kennedy himself. Bobby was Courageous. More so even than his own brother(s) — and they: Joe Jr., Jack, even Teddy were all, despite other failings, Courageous, as well. Bobby was the toughest. He never backed down. Everyone knew, agreed on that point. Anyway, Bobby walked out there — a White man in front of thousands of Black people — and told them that the person they loved and admired most (the person in whom all their dreams — “I Have A Dream!” — was vested) was dead — killed by a white assassin’s bullet. When they heard what happened, they didn’t riot or get violent (as expected). They just gasped — and listened in dejected silence.
He said:
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.4
"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
A tear wells and drops from my eye as I type this . . . Had he lived, this world would be a better place for us all.
Postscript: On June 8, 1968, it all fell upon the youngest and last of the brothers, Ted — the only one (Kennedy male) left — to eulogize his fallen brother. He rose to that occasion, just barely (paralyzed with grief & rage), and said, among other things:
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.
As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:
Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.5
“Kennedy was visibly conscious for a period of seconds, as he lay face up on the gummy pantry floor, blood pooling around his head. ‘I’m hurt,’ he whispered. ‘I’m hurt.’ And then, ‘No, no, no.’ As several men rushed to subdue Sirhan, Juan Romero, the busboy whose hand Kennedy had earlier shaken, knelt next to him and looked up pleadingly. Someone put some rosary beads in Bobby’s hand. He gripped them tightly. As Ethel struggled to get through the crowd to him, a friend saw his lips moving, leaned down next to him, and heard him say, ‘Jack. Jack.’” Richard D. Mahoney, “Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy” (1999) p. 374.
"A few days after RFK’s announcement, Jackie Kennedy — who had begged him not to run — fell into a bleak conversation with [Arthur] Schlesinger at a New York party. ‘Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?’ she said. ‘The same thing that happened to Jack.’” David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” (2015) p. 609.
"Over the final months of the JFK presidency, a clear consensus took shape within the America’s deep state: Kennedy was a national security threat. For the good of the country, he must be removed. And Dulles was the only man with the stature, the connections, and decisive will to make something of this enormity happen . . . All his establishment colleagues had to do was look the other way — as they always did when Dulles took executive action . . . And if the assassination of President Kennedy was indeed an ‘establishment crime,’ as University of Pittsburgh sociology professor David Gibson has suggested, there is even more reason to see the official investigation [i.e., ‘The Warren Commission’] as an establishment cover-up . . . The attorney general’s suspicions about the death of his brother immediately fell not just on the Mafia, but on the CIA — the agency that, as Bobby knew, had been using the mob to do some of its dirtiest work. Robert Kennedy was not the only one in Washington who immediately sensed a conspiracy behind the killing of his brother . . . Suspicions of conspiracy were particularly strong in France, where President de Gaulle himself had been the target of CIA machinations and survived a barrage of gunfire on his own limousine. After returning from Kennedy’s November 24 funeral in Washington, de Gaulle gave a remarkably candid assessment of the assassination to his information minister, Alain Peyrefitte. ‘What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me,’ confided the French president. ‘His story is the same as mine . . . It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.’ . . . Bobby had frenetically chased every lead he could think of, quickly concluding that JFK was the victim of a plot that had spun out of the CIA’s anti-Castro operation. But after this initial burst of clarity, Bobby soon sank into a fog of despair, unable to develop a clear plan of action . . . because there was not clear way to respond.” (Ibid.) Talbot, 2015: 561, 565-567, 606.
The world would have been a better place indeed. It seems the “red or dead” mindset was still at the forefront of “the establishment”. This mindset clouded their vision, where with Jack and Bobby the vision was clear. They, in the establishment, couldn’t see past their elbows. At least Jack and Khrushchev were able to see the danger at the end of the path and turn back. I am alive thanks to them.
The world would have been a better place indeed. It seems the “red or dead” mindset was still at the forefront of “the establishment”. This mindset clouded their vision, where with Jack and Bobby the vision was clear. They, in the establishment, couldn’t see past their elbows. At least Jack and Khrushchev were able to see the danger at the end of the path and turn back. I am alive thanks to them.