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**Written by Doug Powers

From Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Huffington Post column about JFK’s assassination:

Jack had received myriad warnings against visiting the right-wing Texas city. Indeed, there had been a sense of foreboding even within our family as he and Aunt Jackie prepared for the trip. Jack made an unscheduled trip to Cape Cod to say goodbye to my ailing grandfather. The night before the trip, Mummy found Jack distant and brooding at a dinner for the Supreme Court Justices. He was very fond of Mummy, but for the first time ever, he looked right through her.

Jack’s death forced a national bout of self-examination. In 1964, Americans repudiated the forces of right-wing hatred and violence with an historic landslide in the presidential election between LBJ and Goldwater. For a while, the advocates of right-wing extremism receded from the public forum. Now they have returned with a vengeance — to the broadcast media and to prominent positions in the political landscape.

For a second there I expected him to claim witnesses saw Sarah Palin on the grassy knoll.

From a column by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post yesterday:

In the hours following Kennedy’s assassination, aides assumed a right-wing radical was responsible. When Robert Kennedy informed Jacqueline about Lee Harvey Oswald’s leftist background, she felt sick. “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,” she said. “It’s – it had to be some silly little communist.” Eventually, the Warren Commission found no direct connection between Kennedy’s assassination and the city’s “general atmosphere of hate.”

For the record, I agree with RFK, Jr. — there does need to be an examination of conscience, and that examination starts at home. Not once in Kennedy’s 870-word column assessing blame for his uncle’s assassination did he mention the name “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Is it too much to ask that the people who pulled the triggers in Dallas and Tucson be assigned some guilt? It’s starting to feel that way — and that’s a tragedy too.

**Written by Doug Powers

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