In 1997, thanks to the opening of Soviet archives, we learned that just a few weeks after the assassination, RFK and Jackie Kennedy secretly told Soviet leaders they believed that President Kennedy had been “felled by domestic opponents” through “a large political conspiracy,” “a right-wing conspiracy.”
Canadian historian Timothy Naftali and Russian scholar Aleksandr Fursenko discovered Bobby and Jackie Kennedy’s message in top-secret Soviet intelligence archives and discussed it in their 1997 book
One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (pp. 405-407). Bobby and Jackie sent the message through a close family friend, William Walton. James Douglass discusses this historic message in his book
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis edition, 2011):
In early December 1963, William Walton traveled to Moscow on behalf of Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy to convey a secret message to the Soviet leaders about President Kennedy’s assassination. Walton used an already scheduled trip, at JFK’s request “to visit Moscow to meet Soviet artists,” as a cover for his revised purpose of telling the Russians what the Kennedys thought lay behind Dallas. The Kennedys’ message to the Russians was retained in top-secret Soviet intelligence archives. It was discovered in the 1990s by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, who then reported it in their 1997 book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, One Hell of a Gamble.
Walton conveyed the Kennedys’ secret assessment of the assassination to Georgi Bolshakov, the journalist/intelligence agent who had been their most trusted Soviet confidant in the months around the time of the Missile Crisis. In Washington, working out of the Soviet Embassy, Georgi Bolshakov had met repeatedly with Attorney General Robert Kennedy in secret to convey questions and concerns between Chairman Khrushchev and President Kennedy. In Moscow after the assassination, he was in a corresponding position to relay Walton’s discreet information to Chairman Khrushchev.
The Kennedys informed Bolshakov through Walton that “despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world,” they believed “there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald’s rifle” that came from a different source. In their view, “the President was felled by domestic opponents.” He had been, the Kennedys thought, “the victim of a right-wing conspiracy.”
Walton added that the Russian leaders should have no illusions that Lyndon Johnson would continue JFK’s work for peace. Johnson, Walton said, would be “incapable of realizing Kennedy’s unfinished plans.” (JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 471-472)
Bobby and Jackie’s message is especially remarkable because it was sent at a time when the federal government and nearly all news reports were adamantly proclaiming that JFK’s death was nothing but the work of a Marxist nutjob who had acted totally alone, the deranged act of a disturbed loner who had once defected to the Soviet Union and who had defended Castro’s communist regime.
