RFK Jr. on recent history

 

Holden Culotta

@Holden_Culotta

61 years after JFK’s assassination, take 6 minutes to hear RFK Jr. unravel the trauma Americans have been put through since 1963. “Today, we ARE the military-industrial complex.” “It’s like a Kabuki theatre of democracy.” “Three days before [JFK] took office, President Eisenhower gave what I think we should today regard as the most important speech in American history. He warned Americans against the domination of this emerging military-industrial complex that would turn us into an imperium abroad and a security state at home. [JFK] takes office three days later, and then his 1,000 days in office are just a constant fistfight with the military-industrial complex to keep the country out of war. They tried to get him to go into Laos, he refused. They tried to get him to go into Cuba in ‘61 and again in ‘62 during the missile crisis, and he wouldn’t. They tried to get him to go into Berlin in ‘62, and he wouldn’t. They tried to get him to go into Vietnam… and he said it can’t be our fight. In October 1963 … [JFK] signed National Security Order 263 ordering all military personnel out of Vietnam. Thirty days after he signed that order, he was murdered. And a week after that, President Johnson remanded the order and then sent 250,000 troops in. My father ran against the war in ‘68. He wins the California primary, meaning he’s on his way to the White House, and he’s shot that night. Martin Luther King had become a peace activist two months before he was shot. These traumas—my uncle’s death, my father, King’s death, the Vietnam War itself, 9/11, and Covid—pushed us a little farther down that road that Eisenhower warned us against. Part of unraveling that and going back to our original idealism … means going back and looking at the original trauma and exposing what actually happened to my uncle.”