Robert Kennedy Jr., who recently launched a long shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, said his father’s “first instinct” was that the CIA killed former President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy Jr. said the first call his father, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, made after learning his uncle had been shot was to a CIA desk officer.
“My father said to him, ‘Did your people do this?’” Kennedy Jr. told Fox News’s “Hannity” on Monday.
“His next call was to [Enrique Ruiz-Williams], who was one of the Cuban Bay of Pigs leaders who had remained very, very close to our family and to my father,” he continued. “My father asked him the same question.”
Kennedy Jr. said his father then called John McCone, the head of the CIA, and asked him to come to the family’s house.
“When I came home [from] Sidwell Friends School, my father was walking in the yard with John McCone, and my father was posing the same question to him, ‘Was it our people who did this to my brother?’” he said. “It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother.”
The Democratic presidential candidate recently expressed support for the conspiracy theory that the CIA killed Kennedy, an allegation that the agency has repeatedly denied.
“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder,” Kennedy said in an interview with radio talk show host John Catsimatidis on Sunday. “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”
Kennedy’s assassination has fueled endless conspiracy theories in the last 60 years, particularly after a 1979 House committee suggested it was probable there were at least two gunmen involved and coconspirators in the assassination plot.