Reviews & Comments
"Within minutes of learning of President John F. Kennedy's murder on Nov. 22, 1963, Robert F. Kennedy was working the phones, looking for answers to how his brother had died. "There's so much bitterness," he told a colleague that day. "I thought they would get one of us." But who were "they"? Robert Kennedy gravitated immediately to a shadowy nexus of forces he believed were at odds with the policies of his brother's administration. Was it the C.I.A.? he asked John McCone, the director of central intelligence. Was the assassination the work of anti-Castro Cubans? Was it the American Mafia? Or was it -- since there were hidden but important connections among these groups -- a combined effort by them all? Before he had ever heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert Kennedy was considering scenarios that would eventually become the foundation of the myriad conspiracy theories that have haunted the American imagination for more than 40 years; according to David Talbot, he continued to explore those scenarios until his own death in 1968, even while publicly denying his belief in a conspiracy.
Talbot, the founder and former editor of Salon, the online magazine, is the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy -- and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well. "Brothers" is a fearless, passionate, often angry book that both summarizes much of the vast conspiracy literature and attempts to add new evidence that Talbot himself amassed through dogged interviews with many people connected -- directly or indirectly -- with the Kennedy years.
But this is not just a book about assassination. It is also a story of how the Kennedy brothers tried to change the world. "There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy's administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot," Talbot argues. "It was a presidency that clashed with its own times, and in the end found some measure of greatness." Indeed, it was the courage and vision of Kennedy's presidency -- and the dangers it posed to many entrenched interests in and out of government -- that Talbot believes was the reason for his death. Kennedy had angered the C.I.A. by refusing adequately to support the Bay of Pigs invasion and by considering a rapprochement with Communist Cuba. He had infuriated some of the hard-core anti-Castro émigrés for the same reason. He and his brother had antagonized the Mafia through the Justice Department's relentless efforts to break its power. At the same time, the president had made bitter enemies of conservative Southerners because of his embrace of the civil rights movement; he had invited the contempt of the military by his cautious response to the Cuban missile crisis; and he had alarmed much of the intelligence, military and foreign policy establishments with his plan to end the Vietnam War. John Kennedy, in Talbot's view, had challenged virtually all the premises that were at the heart of the cold war -- that an unremitting conflict with Communism was inevitable as long as the Soviet Union survived; that compromise was tantamount to surrender; that domestic upheaval was a threat to the nation's international interests; and that almost any means could be justified in the struggle with the nation's many enemies. Kennedy had offered an alternative path, one that rejected reckless military action and sought to find common ground for peace, justice and conciliation. Little wonder, Talbot suggests, that so many potent forces were eager to see him dead."
– Alan Brinkley, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
"Talbot (founder, Salon.com) persuasively debunks the "lone gunman" assassination theory presented in Gerald Posner's Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi's recent Reclaiming History, claiming that John and Robert Kennedy were likely murdered by the Mafia, the CIA, and/or anti-Castro Cubans, with Oswald likely framed as JFK's assassin. Although these conspiracies have been the subject of many books, few have been as engrossing in their portrayals as here. Interviews with aging Kennedy officials and a few possible plotters with ties to the underworld give an eerie and convincing authenticity to the author's conclusion that the Kennedys were murdered by criminal forces that the government could not restrain. John and Robert Kennedy are revealed sympathetically; JFK's quest for better relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba likely cost him his life. Robert Kennedy never believed that Oswald acted alone, and he planned to conduct a full investigation into his brother's murder if elected president in 1968. However, RFK's death ended the hope for a government inquest. Talbot ends the book with a damning indictment of the media's shameful failure to cover and pursue the president's assassination. Strongly recommended for public libraries."
– Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
"Former Salon editor Talbot's riveting account of the Kennedy
Administration is heavy drama: CIA spooks as the bad guys, Latin
revolutionaries holding the keys to peace and -- despite what he said
in public -- Bobby's secret wish to investigate JFK's assassination.
Talbot humanizes the Kennedy brothers, too. At one point, when the
situation with the Soviet Union was at its darkest, Jack told his
brother, " ' I want to get off.'...'Get off what?' Bobby asked him.
'Get off the planet.' " Talbot argues that good government comes down
to compassion and back-door diplomacy. His brilliant journalism shows
the Kennedys had a genius for both."
– Jonathan Durbin, People (Four Stars, Critic's Choice)
"A real plotboiler...riveting."
– Rush & Molloy, New York Daily News
