Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Robert Kennedy may have been advised that as long as he didn't dispute the official story of his brother's murder that they would leave him alone, that is: not kill him.

How naive. Just because he wasn't making a stink about the JFK assassination on the campaign trail they would therefore be comfortable with him occupying the White House? The frickin' White House????? After all the trouble they went to rid the White House of John Kennedy, they were going to let his frickin' brother back in there? They were actually going to TRUST him just because on the surface he seemed to be cooperating and accepting the official story? 

He should have known better. He should have known that they were never going to allow that to happen. 

What he should have done is gone public with his intention to find the real culprits, both large and small, that every single person who had a hand in the murder, no matter how peripheral, was going to be held accountable and brought to justice.

And then he should have taken extraordinary security measures, including the use of a Popemobile.  Why the hell not?  It's better than dying. And he should have talked about it. 

"If I fall to another lone nut, I hope you'll know what it means. And I hope you'll avenge my death and my brother's. Do it for our sake and do it for your own."

I was at the Ambassador Hotel the night before Robert Kennedy died. I was a student at UCLA at the time, and I lived in the dorm. A friend and I walked from the UCLA campus to the Ambassador Hotel late the night before. There were already a lot of people and fanfare in anticipation of the next night's triumphant gathering. The energy was very high. I supported Robert Kennedy, but not because of anything to do with his brother's death. He said he was going to end US involvement in the Vietnam War and bring the troops home. I liked the sound of that. I knew it was insane for us to be there. 

And I was also thinking about myself because there was a military draft. They had deferments for college students, but there was already talk that it was grotesquely unfair. And, of course, it was. 

Why should a guy's choice about whether or not to attend college have any bearing on whether the government can seize his life?    
The seizing was wrong- under any circumstances. But, to seize some lives but not others based on college attendance was insane.

And they did get rid of the college deferments. But fortunately for me, my birth date drew a very high number; 265, as I recall. So, I was never subject to being drafted. Regardless, I would not have gone. It was a matter of principle, two of them: The draft was wrong, and that war was wrong. 

But, Robert Kennedy was doomed as soon as he won the California primary because that meant that he was going to be the Democratic nominee, and no one doubted that he could trounce Tricky Dick Nixon. It meant that RFK was the defacto President-elect that very night. And that meant that he had to be killed because the powers-that-be could never allow that.  

I sure wish he had been given better advice. And I sure wish he had reacted loudly and aggressively to his brother's murder. The irony is that the louder he got, the harder it would have been for them to kill him, and the safer he would have been.