On November 22, 1963, Robert F. Kennedy was having lunch beside the pool at his home in McLean, Virginia. He had celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday just two days earlier. His children were nearby, and his wife, Ethel, was with him.
Then the phone rang. On the other end of the line was J. Edgar Hoover, the man Robert Kennedy despised more than anyone else alive. According to numerous accounts, Hoover delivered the news bluntly and without much emotion: he had news for him, the president had been shot.
Robert Kennedy staggered toward the edge of the pool and held on to it. Thirty minutes later, the phone rang again. His brother was dead.
In the hours that followed, Robert Kennedy did something few people understood at the time. He quietly began asking questions, reaching out to people he trusted, trying to understand what had just happened. He would carry those questions with him for the rest of the five years of his life.
To understand what Robert Kennedy said and did after November 22, 1963, you first have to understand who he was before that date and what kind of relationship existed between the Kennedy brothers. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who worked inside the Kennedy White House, recorded in his memoirs that John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy operated with a kind of mental shorthand no one else possessed.
According to Schlesinger, once one of them began a sentence, the other knew what he was saying. They were not just brothers. Each was the other's closest strategic partner.
Robert Kennedy suppressed his own ambitions entirely in the service of his brother. He managed John Kennedy's 1952 Senate campaign, served as chief counsel to the Senate rackets committee beginning in 1955, and when John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, Bobby became attorney general, seated at the heart of absolute power.
Historians described him as the president's de facto chief of staff, participating in every major decision, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. Three years of governing together bound them so completely that their closest aides said they could not always tell where one brother's thinking ended and the other's began.
All of that ended on a Friday afternoon in November. Robert Morgenthau, then a U.S. attorney having lunch with Robert Kennedy at Hickory Hill that day, recalled the moment in detail. He said Kennedy physically ran toward the phone when Hoover called. He heard the news. He immediately told Morgenthau that Jack had been shot in Dallas and that the wound might be fatal.
John Seigenthaler, a Kennedy aide who arrived at Hickory Hill shortly afterward, later described the scene in a PBS "American Experience" documentary about Robert Kennedy. It was a physical blow, the loss of his brother, an emotional and intellectual blow, but it left a physical mark on him. He was in physical pain.
Within an hour of the confirmation of his brother's death, Kennedy walked the grounds of Hickory Hill with his aide Ed Guthman, the Justice Department's spokesman, and said something that stunned Guthman. Kennedy said there was so much bitterness. He said he had thought they would get one of them. He said he had thought it would be him.
That statement, documented in the PBS documentary, the historical records of the Mafia Museum, and several biographies of Robert Kennedy, is one of the most revealing things Robert Kennedy ever said. He did not express shock that an assassination was possible. He said he had thought they would get one of them.
The word "they" tells you exactly where his thinking went, and it did not go immediately to Lee Harvey Oswald. To understand why Bobby Kennedy said those words, you have to understand the war he had spent a decade fighting and whom he had made enemies of in the process.
By November 1963, Robert Kennedy was arguably the toughest attorney general against organized crime the U.S. government had ever known. He had built a division inside the Justice Department designed to prosecute the most powerful criminal figures in the country. And some of those figures had said things that were deeply troubling.
Starting with his work as chief counsel to the Senate committee investigating corruption in 1955, Kennedy had confronted Jimmy Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters union. Their mutual hatred, by all accounts, was real and documented.
As attorney general, Kennedy created what the press called the "Get Hoffa squad," a dedicated unit led by former FBI agent Walter Sheridan whose sole mission was to build a federal case against Hoffa. Under Kennedy's direction, the Justice Department's organized crime indictments rose from 49 defendants in 1960 to 350 by 1962.
He targeted Sam Giancana in Chicago, Santos Trafficante Jr. in Florida, and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans. Three of the most powerful Mafia bosses in the country. Walter Sheridan had personally briefed Kennedy the previous year that an FBI informant reported Hoffa's explicit desire to kill Robert Kennedy, not to threaten him, but to kill him.
On the day of his brother's death, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, who interviewed federal investigator Julius Draznin in 1994, Kennedy contacted Draznin directly, asking him to stay alert through his contacts and to report anything to him personally. This is documented. It happened on the day of the assassination itself.
Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans crime boss whom Kennedy had personally ordered deported in 1961, was said to have told an FBI informant in 1962 that he intended to kill President Kennedy, specifically to stop Robert's prosecutions. That account appears in FBI files released under the JFK Records Act, though it must be noted that it is an informant's report and not a confession, and historians have debated its reliability.
Santos Trafficante Jr. was alleged to have later made a deathbed statement to his attorney, Frank Ragano, documented in Ragano's book "Mob Lawyer," expressing regret about the assassination. That account too is relayed indirectly from a single source.
Here we must be precise. Robert Kennedy knew these men had made threats. He knew they had motive. He and some of his closest aides discussed privately the possibility that organized crime was connected to what happened in Dallas. That is what the evidence shows.
What it does not show is that Kennedy reached a definitive conclusion or named specific individuals as responsible. He had suspicions. He did not have proof. That distinction mattered enormously to him.
On November 29, 1963, one week after Dallas, President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order 11130, which created the Warren Commission. It was chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Its final report, 889 pages long and issued in September 1964, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no credible evidence of a conspiracy.
Many people close to Robert Kennedy later said he harbored doubt about that conclusion. Jack Newfield, the journalist who knew Kennedy personally and wrote "RFK: A Memoir," stated at a publicly archived JFK Library forum, "RFK in Memory," that Kennedy did not fully accept the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald did it.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose documented memoirs of conversations with Robert Kennedy were later published, recorded that Kennedy privately described the Warren Commission investigation as poor. He never said this publicly. He said it to Schlesinger in a private session.
It is important to state clearly that Robert Kennedy did not publicly reject the Warren Commission's findings. He did not hold a press conference, issue a public statement, or formally challenge the report. His doubts, where they existed, were expressed quietly and privately to a small number of trusted friends.
Ted Kennedy, Bobby's younger brother, later stated publicly that he believed Robert accepted the commission's findings, a view that somewhat conflicts with what Schlesinger and Newfield recorded. History offers us no definitive resolution to this contradiction.
What the documented record supports most clearly is this. Robert Kennedy lived in a state of unresolved private doubt. He quietly asked questions through trusted allies without drawing public attention to what he was doing. Walter Sheridan, his longtime investigator, remained in contact about these matters, as documented in Sheridan's oral history interviews archived at the John F. Kennedy Library.
But historians do not agree that a broad, formal private investigation existed. What existed was more restrained. Trusted allies quietly asked questions, and Kennedy listened to what they found.
The reasons for this restraint were practical and impossible to overcome. A genuine parallel investigation would have required the cooperation of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, an institution Kennedy knew had been used against his family for years. It would have required the cooperation of Lyndon Johnson's White House, and it would have required Robert Kennedy to publicly challenge the conclusions of the current president's commission while still serving in that president's government. None of that was possible, so he stayed silent.
He resigned as attorney general in September 1964. He ran for the Senate in New York and won. He continued asking questions through people he trusted, without drawing public attention and without being in a position to do much about the answers.
In the weeks after his brother's murder, Robert Kennedy entered a state of grief that those around him described as absolute. His friend Charles Spalding, who stayed with him in those first days, later recounted what he heard after Bobby's door closed at night. He heard him sobbing, saying, "Why?" This is documented in the PBS "American Experience" documentary about Robert Kennedy.
Adam Walinsky, who became one of Kennedy's closest Senate aides, described what never faded: the grief and the enormous pain. It was present all the time. He never knew him in a state where he was not in some kind of mourning for President Kennedy.
John Seigenthaler described him as a man tortured on the rack. Kennedy would wake in the middle of the night and drive alone. He would go to John Kennedy's grave at Arlington. Those who had known him before said something essential had changed, not only emotionally, but in his understanding of the world.
He turned to books, to Aeschylus, to Camus, to the Greek tragedians, writers who framed catastrophic loss that cannot be explained. His aides later noticed that the themes he found there, about unjust death and how a person continues after what cannot be repaired, began to appear in how he spoke publicly.
He traveled to places he had never gone as attorney general. Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, Native American reservations, and urban poverty. People who remembered the harder-edged Bobby Kennedy, the politician who was sometimes ruthless, watched him transform into something different. His aide Peter Edelman later described this period as Kennedy discovering for the first time that suffering was not abstract. He was now living inside it himself.
He resigned as attorney general in September 1964 and won a Senate seat from New York. But the questions he carried were never resolved, and the plan he quietly and privately formed was becoming clearer in his mind.
Over the five years between Dallas and his death, Robert Kennedy said different things to different people, and the pattern of those conversations tells the story of a man who never fully settled his own account with what had happened. For Schlesinger, there were doubts about the methodology. For Newfield, he was simply a man who could not accept the lone gunman conclusion. For Walter Sheridan, the former investigator he kept close, it was a quiet, sustained interest in what connections to organized crime might exist, without ever reaching a conclusion he could act on.
What is important to note is what Kennedy did not do. He did not name individuals publicly. He did not claim to know who was responsible for what happened. He did not declare that a conspiracy had killed his brother. The accounts of what he said in private describe a man carrying unresolved doubts, not a man who had solved the case and was keeping the answer to himself.
The most accurate summary of Robert Kennedy's position is this. Many friends and close associates later said he harbored private doubt about the Warren Commission's conclusions, and he quietly asked trusted acquaintances to keep their eyes open without drawing public attention to those efforts. Some historians believe that if he had won the presidency, he might have sought to reopen the investigation with the full authority of the executive branch. That is the judgment of historians. It is not a documented statement by Kennedy.
What is documented, and what no account contradicts, is that he lived with the question every day, that it never left him, and that he died before the private answer he reached ever became public.
By the spring of 1968, Robert Kennedy was running for president. He entered the race on March 16, four days after Eugene McCarthy's near-upset of Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire. Four days after Kennedy announced, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. Four days after that, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead in Memphis.
Kennedy was in Indianapolis that night. He stood on a flatbed truck before a crowd that did not yet know their leader had died and told them. He spoke without notes. He quoted Aeschylus. He said that what we need in the United States is not division, what we need is not hatred, what we need is not violence and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another. Indianapolis saw no riots that night, while virtually every other major American city did.
He continued his campaign. He won the Nebraska primary. He lost in Oregon, becoming the first Kennedy ever to lose an election. He won both South Dakota and California on June 4, 1968.
Shortly after midnight on June 5, he stepped onto the podium in the Embassy Room of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He thanked his team. He made a small joke. He said they would win in Chicago. He left through a kitchen corridor.
There, a 24-year-old man named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was waiting. Sirhan had written in his diary weeks earlier that Robert Kennedy must be assassinated. When police arrested him that night, they found in his pocket a newspaper article about Kennedy's support for Israel, a position Sirhan opposed because of Kennedy's commitment to supplying Israel with Phantom jets after the 1967 Six-Day War.
Sirhan fired at close range. Kennedy was hit by three bullets. Five other people in the corridor were also wounded. Robert Francis Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital on June 6, 1968. He was 42 years old. He was buried at night at Arlington National Cemetery, the first funeral ever held there after dark, near his brother John.
The questions Robert Kennedy carried did not die with him. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, a congressional body formed to reexamine the cases of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, concluded that President Kennedy was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy. The committee identified organized crime figures, specifically Marcello and Trafficante, as parties that had the motive, means, and opportunity to be involved, while stopping short of a definitive conclusion about who organized any conspiracy, if one existed.
That finding by a congressional body 16 years after Dallas broadly aligned with the private doubts Robert Kennedy expressed to those close to him in the days and years after the assassination. It resolved nothing. It raised new questions. It led to no prosecutions.
Conversations of Carlos Marcello recorded later through federal wiretaps released under the JFK Records Act appeared to suggest his involvement in the assassination conspiracy. Those recordings exist within declassified files. Historians continue to argue about their reliability and meaning.
Jimmy Hoffa, the man Sheridan and Kennedy quietly focused on that November 1963 afternoon, was convicted on charges prepared by the Justice Department under Kennedy, went to prison, was later pardoned by Richard Nixon, and disappeared in 1975. His disappearance remains officially unsolved.
The 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations report remains the last official U.S. government body to formally examine the assassination. Its conclusion of a possible conspiracy has never been formally revisited or overturned.
The question of what Robert Kennedy believed about his brother's assassination is ultimately not a question about conspiracy theory. It is a question about what it means to carry something you cannot resolve, a doubt you cannot prove, a grief that finds no outlet, and a case you cannot make.
What the documented record shows is this. Many close to him said he harbored private doubts about the Warren Commission's conclusions. He quietly asked trusted allies to keep their ears open without drawing public attention to those efforts. He never publicly challenged the official findings. He never named who he believed was responsible. Some historians believe that if he had reached the White House, he might have sought to reopen the investigation with the full authority of the presidency.
We will never know. He was killed before he got there. He said, on the afternoon of the day his brother died, that there was so much bitterness. He said he had thought they would get one of them. Five years later, they did.