Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t stopped parsing through the evidence surrounding his father’s assassination, and he similarly can’t let go of his uncle, John F. Kennedy’s, murder. When JFK was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, it rocked the nation and the world and left his family shattered. The loss was particularly tough on his brother, Robert F. Kennedy.
Speaking at a 2013 event marking the 50th anniversary of the president’s death, RFK Jr. opened up about the impact that day had on his father. He told listeners, per NBC News, that his dad spent an entire year reading books by various philosophers, poets, and scholars, as he tried to come to terms with JFK’s tragic death. “[He was] trying to figure out kind of the existential implications of why a just God would allow injustice to happen of the magnitude he was seeing,” RFK Jr., who was just 9 at the time, recalled.
As if mourning the loss of his uncle and watching his dad struggle weren’t enough, the young RFK Jr. soon became obsessed with figuring out what really happened that day. While Lee Harvey Oswald was sentenced for the crime, RFK was convinced the CIA was involved. “It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother,” RFK Jr. told Fox News in 2023. It’s a thread he himself has since picked up, studying endless documents in an effort to prove his father’s hunch was right.
