45 Years Since RFK Assassination Retrospective: Media Coverage Of The RFK Assassination

In Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations On The Conspiracy and Cover-Up, Southeastern Massachusetts University Professor Philip Melanson asserted in the early 1990s that "after more than two decades of tortured evidentiary logic, secrecy and deception, the official version of the RFK assassination has been so discredited that it collapsed like a house of cards" and "a second gunman, a female accomplice, a hypno-programmed assailant--all have been obscured by what is surely one of the most concerted, longest-running, best-documented cover-ups in the history of U.S. law enforcement..."

The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination book also asserted the following:

"Media coverage...has all too often been absent, biased toward official sources, sensationalized or geared exclusively toward human-interest stories (that is, who is still interested in the case and what makes them tick)...The effect of this deficient attention has been to make it easier for the investigating authorities to shield themselves from accountability as well as to perpetuate myths and disinformation suupportive of the official version of the assassination...

"The Hollywood myth of the RFK case--lone assassin, open-and-shut, thorough investigation--that presently dominates our political culture is a costly deception."

Coincidentally, in its November 1966 issue, the alternative newspaper The Movement noted the following:

"Last month Robert Kennedy's brother-in-law was killed in the crash of a private plane in Idaho. Killed with him was Louis Werner II, a St. Louis investment banker. The AP dispatch on the crash identified him as an employee of the CIA. The New York Times story said he had been for 15 years the chief of the St. Louis CIA office, and that his principal job was the recruitment of personnel for the spy agency."

(Downtown 6/29/94)