RFK was shot today 37 years ago,

[IChing]

Announcement of Candidacy for President

Washington, D.C. March 16, 1968

I am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies - policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war.

I run because it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who are now making them. For the reality of recent events in Vietnam has been glossed over with illusions.>>>snip

I have traveled and I have listened to the young people of our nation andfelt their anger about the war that they are sent to fight and about the world they are about to inherit.

In private talks and in public, I have tried in vain to alter our course in Vietnam before it further saps our spirit and our manpower, further raises the risks of wider war, and further destroys the country and the people it was meant to save.

http://www.rfkmemorial.org/RFK/68_announcement.htm

I have no doubt he would have beat Nixon

[Cooley Hurd]

1. "...now, on to Chicago, and let's win there!"

:cry:

What could've been...:cry:

[serryjw]

8. I was THERE

Where would an 18 liberal be when their hero was on to the White House....One of the happiest and sadest days of my life What coulda been I think of it often.

[FreedomAngel82]

37. Even though I wasn't alive then

(for all I know of course) I always wonder what it would've been like if both Kennedy men were never shot. Would we still have had though Bill Clinton and John Kerry? I hope they're all together again and being happy and their souls are in peace.

[serryjw]

44. 8 years of John..8 years of Bobby

It would have been a very different world.

[CarolNYC]

33. Sad thing is....

if he were around today some segment of the Democratic Party wouldn't accept him...that work with Joe McCarthy and all. Robert was the rare politician who learned and grew and changed as he lived. There are some that don't trust that in a political figure....It is one of the things that appeals most strongly to me about him.

[fortyfeetunder]

2. I remember this day...sigh

Washington DC had barely recovered from the riots after the Martin Luther King assassination, and this event happens.

My class had scheduled a field trip to the White House the day after, and of course it was postponed....

[jaxx]

3. I've seen nothing about this on or in the media today.

Thanks for the reminder. In this republican oriented society, the last thing we'll be hearing about is a Kennedy.

[IChing]

5. except that Raygun is still dead

[countingbluecars]

21. You're right.

I saw nothing about this in the media today, but did hear plenty of republicans trying to revise Watergate history.

[ooglymoogly]

27. the infinite reagan replays and flyboy story with smarmy paula.

puke....nothing about one of our greatest presidents and his brother rfk who would have also became one of our greatest presidents if not shot at the hands of the caniving pugs. another big cover up

[IChing]

34. Raygun is on the cover of US news and World report this week

"I believe that,
as long as there is plenty,
poverty is evil.
Robert Kennedy"

[IChing]

35. Raygun is on the cover of US news and World report this week

"I believe that,
as long as there is plenty,
poverty is evil.
Robert Kennedy"

[FreedomAngel82]

38. I told my dad

and he said he heard it this morning while he was watching the news before church. I don't know what network though.

[MrBenchley]

7. My high school senior prom was held the next day....

Talk about a bummer...

[IChing]

13. I lived in Arlington at that time also, class of 69

They dug up Fort Meyers south at that time to make room for more graves,
Yes, I remember the riots also, and you could see the fires from Arlington at night.

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant.
The evil is not what they say about their cause,
but what they say about their opponents."

Robert Kennedy
Extremism

[Warren Stupidity]

4. it was this day 37 years ago

that I realized, this being the third major successful political assasination in a few short years, that nothing was as it seemed, that we were being ruled and manipulated by an amoral cabal who would stop at nothing, including murder, to acheive their goals and keep hold of their power.

For a period of time in the 80's and 90's the madness of this reality seemed to fade into the background. The world was more or less at peace, economic good times were here, and the demands of family and career drew my focus away from the gathering storm.

And then it was the stolen election of 2000. 9/11 and the horrible thought that this was LIHOP or MIHOP. The war. The endless terralerts. The dubious elections of 2002 and 2004. The suppression of independent media voices. The patriot act. Abu Ghraib. Gitmo. Rendition. The daily carnage of the endless war after the war.

We are back where we were in 1968. Only this time the cabal is much better organized.

[IChing]

6. "On the Mindless Menace of Violence"

>>>>snip

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.>>snip

http://www.rfkmemorial.org/RFK/april5_1968.htm

[DaveinMD]

9. RFK

is my political hero. He's the last politician that was able to unite poor people across racial lines. The world would have been much different had he lived.

[CarolNYC]

12. Amen. n/t

[Reverend_Smitty]

24. Same here

I don't think the left in this country have fully recovered from his death...If he was elected you can be sure that there never would have been a "Reagan Revolution" in the 80's

[mohinoaklawnillinois]

10. I remember waking up the next morning and my Granma

telling me "Bobby Kennedy was shot last night in Los Angeles."

I had just finished my sophomore year in high school and June 6th was the first day of summer vacation. My oldest brother was in Vietnam and had been since November and my other brother had just graduated from high school the weekend before. My friends and I had made plans that day to go to Rainbow Beach in Chicago for our first "tanning" session of the summer. Needless to say, our beach plans were cancelled and I just remember moping around that day and wondering, what the hell is going on in the world?

1968 was an unforgettable year.

[PsyOpsRunsOurCountry]

11. And COINTELPRO is now powered by super computers and Bob Woodward.

(Character assassination is more common than the bullet kind. The Ward Churchill story continued in the Rocky Mountain News yesterday led me to connect the dots to Deep Throat and his COINTELPRO crimes which 'Patriot Act II' are designed to advance in today's Vietnam War. Here is that post.-poroc)
--------------------------------------------------

It's very important to the US government to hide the fact that it controls the corporate media and kills political opponents, especially while trying to maintain a permanent oil-war 'against terrorism.' Patsies, distractions, and cover stories by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward are at the center of this ongoing crime with the body count skyrocketing in Iraq and Americans becoming unsettled by it all.


The public crucifixion of Ward Churchill is really using black propaganda against an anti-war activist and whistle-blower in order to:
1) Keep another anti-war movement from forming.
2) Protect Bob Woodward’s cover as an intelligence operative at the Washington Post.
3) Reinforce the CIA’s biggest cover story-‘the liberal media.’
4) Prevent revealing Deep Throat's role in the terrorism against the anti-war movement carried out by the FBI back in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
5) Prevent all of this from making people notice that Patriot Act II is about to quietly go ‘in to law’ to give the FBI search powers worse than the old COINTELPRO.
6) Keep the ‘Global War on Terror’ cover story going to hide permanent oil war.


And all with the help of WP editor Bob Woodward, a White House/CIA shill just like the infamous ‘Jeff Gannon’ discovered earlier this year.
THE SIXTIES MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN AGAIN DESPITE THE INTERNET.
So truth tellers must be neutralized with chilling smears or 'driven to suicide' to prevent anti-war movements from coalescing into strong resistance by high school and college kids the Pentagon is desperate to get its hands on.
(Both Hunter Thompson and Gary Webb are gone? Damn. You have to wonder…)

To prevent people from looking at American political terrorism, they are smearing one of the most outspoken activists and authors who wrote about US law-enforcement's home-cooked terrorism against their own citizens which continues today with Patriot II about to sneak under the wire and give the FBI power to do anything it wants to the Ward Churchill’s among us.

Here's just one of Churchill's books on COINTELPRO:

http://www.southendpress.org/books/Cointelpro2.shtml

>snip<

"The COINTELPRO Papers, Updated Edition
Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States
by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall

Readers anxious about the loss of civil liberties under George W. Bush will find ground for their fears-and suggestions for activism-in The COINTELPRO Papers. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's exposé of America's political police force, the FBI, reveals the iron fist hiding beneath the velvet glove of "compassionate conservatism."

Reproducing many original FBI memos, the authors provide extensive analysis of the agency's treatment of the left, from the Communist Party in the 1950s to the Central America solidarity movement in the 1980s. Ward Churchill's substantial new preface to this South End Press Classics edition updates the cases of several incarcerated Black Panthers and analyzes the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco, as well as the wars on drugs and terrorism. Churchill makes a compelling argument that U.S. law enforcement has become thoroughly militarized, with devastating consequences for all those who work for social justice."


http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/CHUW001.shtml
Ward Churchill is one of the leading activists and whistle-blowers against US government abuse of its own citizens by the FBI called COINTELPRO, at its worst during the Vietnam War.

http://agitprop.org.au/stopnato/20000318mediaoverb.php
The CIA control of the media, called Operation Mockingbird, is being used at the Rocky Mountain News to DEFLECT ATTENTION away from FBI/CIA TERRORISM AGAINST THE AMERICAN LEFT in the 60s and 70s called COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) which Churchill was a victim of and wrote about at length.

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/Media%20Readings/Berstein%20-%20CIA%20and%20the%20Media.htm
(Here's some of Carl Bernstein's 1977 article on Operation Mockingbird picking up where the 1975 Church Committee hearings on CIA abuses left off. Interestingly, Bernstein steers attention away from his own Washington Post where he and Bob Woodward wrote about Watergate. This is long before Murdoch Faux News disinformation channel.)

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm
91 year-old Mark Felt, the Watergate mystery source called Deep Throat revealed this week by his own family, was the #2 FBI official under J. Edgar Hoover when they were MURDERING and terrorizing the anti-Vietnam War activists and leaders like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and dozens of Black Panthers. They murdered 21 year-old Fred Hampton IN HIS SLEEP and many innocent Black Panthers are still in jail 30 years later.

http://test.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/536364.html
The smear campaign against Churchill was renewed early in 2005 when the CIA was forced to release documents showing they collaborated with Nazi Adolph Eichmann's assistants after WWII. The CIA was formed in 1946 using many Nazi war criminals as intelligence assets along with Mafia

http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2
The internet knows that W's grandpa Prescott financed Hitler so hiding the Bush-Nazi link is harder than ever now.

http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm
So the CIA dug up a Ward Churchill essay on 9/11 with the key word 'Eichmann' in it and turned the dogs of Fox News loose on him as a pre-emptive distraction using all the emotional charge of 9/11 against 'leftists who hate America.'

This was also a propaganda preparation for this week's long-awaited announcement of Deep Throat's identity which was being arranged for several months by a SF lawyer's negotiations with Esquire Magazine and therefore known to the CIA. (They know everything including that I'm writing this and you are reading it. Thanks, Admiral Poindexter!)

http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr196-woodward.html
WP Editor Bob Woodward of Watergate fame is also an intelligence operative so he would have known not just Deep Throat’s identity but that Deep Throat's involvement with COINTELPRO would surface soon, too.

(Read the bottom side-bar at that url about the problems of Woodward's account of how he would signal Deep Throat. Woodward's 6/2/05 article about how he met Deep Throat devotes lots of words to trying to explain exactly the inconsistencies outlined in this 1996 online article. Woodward knows his cover is thin. Both he and Felt screwed Americans with lies. Woodward still does at the Washington Post.)

Ward Churchill was prepared to be grilled like a marinated steak by the wolves of CIA propaganda to give the 'Mockingbird' press red meat to peck at. Native American red meat, that is. All to hide elimination of the Bill of Rights and hide American war crimes in a massive disinformation system called ‘corporate media.’

This all allows the Nazi-Bush Crime Family to wipe out Fallujah as if it were the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto and allow the Washington Post to cover it up to assist the Permanent Oil War campaign in progress.

[chieftain]

14. RFK and MLK were and still are my heroes.

I was in Lawrence Kansas to see Bobby the day after he announced for the Presidency. He gave a marvelous speech about the horrors of war and the obscenity of poverty in this the greatest nation on earth. Sadly, it could be given again today.
On the night he was shot, we had left a party celebrating finishing final exams for my senior year in college. The joy of that event was dashed by the anguish of seeing that good man being taken from us when he could have made such a difference in our history.
That night, I vowed to leave the US for good. I didn't do it. I stayed and have done well. I had not had similar thoughts of leaving until the Bush Crowd appeared on the scene. They are destroying my notion of what America is and I really wonder if we can ever take our country back.
Thanks for reminding us of the significance of the date.

[FreedomAngel82]

39. That's why we have to stay and fight

the Bush clan and his croonies. We can't let them get away with this and let good people suffer so they can have their wealth and oil. If not for people in general then for their (John and Robert Kennedy's) memories and legacies not going down and to help try to finish their work.

[fortyfeetunder]

15. I nominated this one

so folks living then won't forget, and the folks who weren't born yet (or too young to remember) will not forget the date.

:kick:

[Hippo_Tron]

16. RFK would've wiped the floor with Nixon

And would've saved thousands of lives because he has a real solution to the Vietnam quagmire.

[struggle4progress]

17. ... Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?

Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walk up over the hill,
With Abraham, Martin and John.

[acmejack]

18. He was the first I supported.

I cried then and I am a little choked up now. What a tremendous loss to mankind, I really believe he would have had that type of impact on society. To you, Bobby and what might have been...

[napi21]

19. I was watching TV when that happened!

All I can remember saying was "OH NO! Not another one!"

[VOX]

22. Same here. Stayed up late to watch the CA primary returns...

There was much confusion after RFK was shot -- fragmented information, conflicting reports, etc. It was unthinkable that this was happening yet again. Here. In this country.

As monumentally tragic and senseless as JFK's and MLK's murder were, RFK's murder clearly changed the face of the American political landscape. Today's wasteland of right-wing radicalism has direct roots going back to the death of RFK.

[Coexist]

20. kick

[nevergiveup]

23. The momentum was changing.....Bobby would have won

It seems so long ago.....God bless his soul

[stevedeshazer]

25. I met him just days before his death.

I was thirteen.

I still get emotional about his death every time it's brought up.

[jbnow]

40. I was also 13

I loved him...in the way you might have to be 13 to do. I remember fierce debates with a couple of teachers who felt he cowardly waited until McCarthy took the step of going against Johnson. I collected every clipping, every article I could find. I had so much hope.

I was up late too and could not believe what was happening. I never grieved so hard, not before or since. I wrote some poem that night that my mom found and sent to the newspaper without asking. I didn't know until they published it and I was mad and sad, that was my heart poured out on paper.

Even then I didn't think he was perfect but I didn't doubt his sincerity or passion or what he could do for the country. It must have been a thrill to meet him! Though it might have made his death all the harder too. I am identifying with you because I remember the passion I felt then that is so specific to that age.

I never felt passion for another politician until Wellstone, not even from my state, but that thoughtful honesty and intelligence moved me. Guess I politicians don't do well when I "love them".

Like you I still get emotional when reminded of RFK...the lost potential and that young girl's grief.

[stevedeshazer]

46. I still have a bunch of newspaper clippings

He visited my small town (population 5,000), and the local newspaper had good coverage. I carried a sign that said 'We <heart> Bobby'. My parents were Gene McCarthy supporters, so they were mortified.

Some day I'll get busy and scan the clippings so I can post them here.

Thanks for sharing your memory.

[Name removed]

26. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Historic NY]

28. my hero..........Bobby we miss you.

Ripple of Hope
"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

As I look back I think of his influence on me then and now. I was in my teens, really just getting started when I heard his speeches. I remember him touring the poor and impoverished, climbing the mountain. He while thinking about his brother legeacy was actually carving out a place to finish the work necessay to improve the lot of all human beings. I sat up with my brother and father we were all excited that he won the primary, and then........the horror. We all hoped and prayed when we saw him moving on the floor that this was a bad dream. I sometime hope a new Bobby would emerge that would stir people to action to finally fix the ills of this nation.

[ginnyinWI]

30. I was 17

It was a sad, sad day.

[xkenx]

36. The New Bobby Kennedy is

Wes Clark. Not since Bobby Kennedy has a public figure inspired me as has General Clark. He is the all-American boy grown up to be the caring, compassionate Democrat we have been seeking all these years.
For any of you who have not yet learned about this national treasure, it is time. And to be in time for 2008.

[Poppyseedman]

29. There is credible evidence Sirhan Sirhan (POS) that shot RFK

was in fact given orders from Yasser Arafat or at least was motivated by his cause.

It would not surprise me in the least if it was true

1968 was also the year of Munich Olympic terrorist event masterminded by Arafat killing Israel's athletes

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

32. And who was pulling Arafat's strings?

Cui bono? tells us that it probably originated from the States.

[NoPasaran]

50. Munich was 1972

The 1968 Olympics were in Mexico City... kinda makes me question your premise

[EVDebs]

31. Someone told me once check into the ownership of Ambassador Hotel

And you'll get clues to the assassin. Hmmm. It turns out to have been in the G. David Schine family's hands back then.

This would mean ties to the whackjobs in the McCarthy lunatic fringe which now predominates the Republican party. And I hear that the Hotel and pantry area are to be torn down.

[FreedomAngel82]

41. There's some good information

I've read on Schine.

Link: http://www.answers.com/topic/roy-cohn


Apparently he is linked as a good friend to Roy Cohn who was a chief counsel to McCarthy who got the position over Robert Kennedy. According to this link Cohn was gay and it's wildley believed that Schine was his lover. Cohn was said to be at gay bars but he always denied it and worked at anti-gay policies (go figure).

This site has some good information. http://www.greensky.biz/articles/Roy_Cohn?mySession=e5499cabe475dc93e3667f768cfb2e7b

If you google Roy Cohn, G. David Schine, and Richard Nixon he is linked to them.

[OzarkDem]

42. RFK Funeral Train

Link to a great flash video that brings back a lot of memories and shows the diversity of people RFK brought together.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/onassignment/rfk/excerpt.html

[housewolf]

43. I remember that night so clearly..

I was in college, all of my roomates had left for a summer break so I was alone. I wasn't a Dem at the time but was crushed by the news, took it REAL hard. I lost a good chunk of my idealism that night, along with my trust in the goodness of people's hearts.

[CalebHayes]

45. Personally he is one of my political heroes. I think he was ...

way better than his brother. I love JFK but honestly he had some weaknesses. RFK was a much stronger guy. He wasn't addicted to drugs and he wasn't cheating on his wife.

[ROH]

47. Nominated (n/t)

[jim3775]

48. Some photos

[gulliver]

49. No Sirhan Sirhan, no Nixon. No Nixon, no Bush Sr., ...

... No Bush Sr., no Junior.

We are living in the world Sirhan Sirhan created.

[Born_A_Truman]

51. Wire photos

I still have the original wire photos from the tv station I was working at back then. They are in an old trunk. I don't know if they have survived because they were like the old thermal fax paper. I should get them out and scan them too. I had sent them to my parents and found them in their papers when they died.

[BlueIris]

52. I wondered if I was the only poster thinking about this today.

Well, yesterday.

It's also actor Ron Livingston's birthday. Ron, my favorite performer in Hollywood (basically the most underrated actor of his generation, if you ask me) is a Dem and fellow Kerry supporter. Basically, he rocks. I've always wanted to meet him and ask him if having been born on the day RFK was shot has influenced his worldview at all.

[deutsey]

53. His funeral was one of my earliest memories

I wish it had been his inauguration.