they won't sue; it must
be true. As a corollary, this shows that the old adage about
history being written by the victors stands. In this upside down
milieu, all the Kennedys' sworn enemies can talk to any cheapjack
writer with a hefty advance and recycle another thrashing.
Mobsters and those in their employ, CIA officers and their
assets, rabid right-wingers et. al. Escorted by these writers,
they now do their dances over the graves of the two men they
hated most in life and can now revile in death. There is
something Orwellian about this of course.
The converse of this thesis is also true. The voices the Kennedys
symbolized are now squelched. Collier and Horowitz are intent on
never letting the ghost of the sixties reappear. The poor, the
weak, minorities, and the left's intelligentsia must not be
unsheathed again. (As Todd Gitlin notes in his book The Sixties,
on occasion, the Kennedy administration actually had SDS members
in the White House to discuss foreign policy issues.) The image
of JFK on national television giving hell to the steel companies;
of Kennedy staking out his policy for detente at American
University; of RFK grilling Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa; of
Bobby going through the personnel list at the State Department to
be sure there was no Dulles still on the payroll; these images
have to be erased. Most of all, the RFK of 1965-68 witgry at the
perversion of his brother's policies, must be subverted. Who of
the elite would want people to remember RFK saying these words:
What the Alliance for Progress has come down to then is that
[the native rulers] can close down newspapers, abolish
Congress, fail religious opposition, and deport your
political enemies, and you'll get lots of help, but if you
fool around with a U.S. oil company, we'll cut you off
