Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

With admirable circumstantial detail, journalist David Talbot vividly portrays the life and times and assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Even though President Kennedy in his anticommunist fervor had allowed himself to get mixed up in the ill-advised Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he learned from his mistake in going along with this ill-advised scheme and lived long enough after it to become a courageous warrior, as did his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, fighting for a better America.

Talbot highlights how JFK took on the military-industrial complex that outgoing President Eisenhower had warned Americans to watch out for. Unfortunately, JFK was not able to slay this formidable dragon. As a result, the United States today oversees a global empire of military bases, as Chalmers Johnson has detailed in _The Sorrows of Empire_ (2004).

Talbot devotes painstaking attention to building up reasons to doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Talbot establishes that the Kennedys had enemies who just might undertake having the president assassinated: the Mafia, the CIA, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Whoever the culprits were, the same culprits may have also orchestrated the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy on June 4, 1968.

Talbot presents no conclusive evidence as to who exactly the culprits may have been in either assassination. Instead, he evokes the sense that there were plausible plotters aplenty who had the motives and the means to plot and carry out the two assassinations.

Talbot's greatest achievement arguably is presenting a compelling case of circumstantial detail for more of the relevant records to be made available for careful scrutiny.

After the assassinations of JFK in 1963 and of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 and of RFK in 1968, the trajectory of American politics has been downward sloping. The time has come to open all the relevant records on these assassinations and try to bring to light who the exact culprits were in each case.

--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

In the end author David Talbot is unable to produce either a smoking gun or solid proof of exactly who killed John F. Kennedy. To be fair, such a book seems impossible given all the classified information pertaining to the case that are still under lock and key. But what Talbot does is view the JFK presidency and assassination through the eyes of his brother and attorney general, Robert Kennedy. Talbot also manages to offset some of the fashionable anti-Kennedy revisionist history that has been in recent vogue, framing JFK as a crusader who challenged the military-industrial complex and CIA hawkish world views.
Indeed it is the very challenge, that call for moderated and peaceful solutions to the Cold War that Talbot strongly suggests was at the heart of his murder. Talbot details the brothers' refusal to back the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, their refusal to go nuclear during the Cuban Missile Crisis (pun intended) and their desire to work amicably with the Soviet Union and to find a peaceful solution to the burgeoning disaster in Vietnam. All these views and efforts put them at odds with the the hard right wingers of the military and CIA and made them some very serious enemies.
As as a long-time student of the assassination I appreciated Talbot's refusal to bog himself down in dissecting that Warren report which has already been picked clean (it still has some supporters as does the belief that the Earth is flat). Talbot also didn't waste reader time tracking down every ridiculous lead on the assassination that has popped up these 40 plus years. Instead Talbot sticks to the principal players within the Kennedy administration, and what they knew and believed. Mostly he follows Robert Kennedy who was traumatized by his brother's death but had the courage, after initial struggles, to move on with his political life. Talbot convinces us that RFK would have solved the mystery of the assassination had he been elected president (can there be much doubt that his own assassination was to keep that quest from being successful?)
Talbot is clearly an unabashed fan of the Kennedy brothers and views them heroically. Moreover he'll win over skeptical readers. The author also sees an unmistakable CIA role in their murders. This too he is able to support with a preponderance of evidence both circumstantial and rock solid.
No, "Brothers" does not solve the case but at the very least it will keep hope alive that some day we may get some answers. Meanwhile readers will find their appreciation of the Kennedys rekindled.
"Brothers" is a smooth, fast read recommended for those interested in the assassination and the Kennedy years.

This book is a triumph. A triumph of truth over propaganda and a triumph of powerful and gripping writing. It is tremendously successful in immersing us in the hostile environment the two Brothers found themselves in after entering the white house, and underscoring the fact that the hostility was from their own government, not some lone nut patsy.

By making decisions based on the public good, President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy incurred the deadly wrath of the pentagon cold warriors, the new world order warriors, the CIA warriors, LBJ and his minions, the Texas Oil millionaires, and the right wing nutters like the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and the KKK. The brothers interrupted an ongoing process wherein the military-industrial-congressional complex (a phrase coined by President Eisenhower who later softened it to "military-industrial complex") was solidifying their post WW2 power and making war the biggest most profitable business in the US. By contrast John F. Kennedy described himself as "almost a peace at any price president." He paid the ultimate price in his quest for peace, as did his brother.

"Brothers" allows to see these facts, to see the two young Kennedy men as strangers in a strange land, isolated in their own administration after years of Truman and Eisenhower neglect allowed the CIA and pentagon to get out of control. As General McArthur warned President Kennedy shortly after his 1961 inauguration "The chickens are coming home to roost. And you just moved into the coop."

On November 22, 1963 irresistible armed forces met an immovable object. They couldn't control John Kennedy so they eliminated him. Shortly after that they eliminated his brother. Now we are without great leaders.

David Talbot shows us how we got here, and what we lost on the way.

Brothers chronicles how the children of elites attempted to take on the United States power structure from within the administrative branch--and who the enemies were, determined to bring them down.

Because several preceeding books have previously been written about the Kennedy brothers, readers might initially be skeptical about picking up David Talbot's work. I can affirmatively assure them that this one is a keeper for your personal library. It reads like a really good mystery book which you know just has to make it to the screen someday.

Talbot disperses some light-hearted trivia throughout his book (Jack was a forerunner of what would be known as 'metrosexual' because he would hold meetings in his underwear' and commented on the attractiveness of other men) but it is not a celebrity triva book. He provided the trivia to take readers into the complex psyches which constructed both men in eras when they were, frankly being immortalized as plastic and one-dimensional images.

A strength of Talbot's writing is that he is obviously an admirer of the Kennedy's. He gets a little too partisan at times, but comparatively appears less partisan than earlier books in the pro-Kennedy camp. Footnotes are provided at the back of the book for reference, so he's not just shooting off his mouth for the sake of it.

I was born well after the times referenced in this book, but the well-writen text took me to the places referenced and drew me in. I really understood the radical potential the Kennedy brothers had for transforming America and why the modern new right organized against them so fiercly.

Outstanding on every level: narrative power, original research, unabashed defense of a likely conspiracy behind JFK's murder. If you read Anthony Summers' "Conspiracy" (now titled "Not in Your Lifetime"), this is the best book on the JFK assassination since that book ... and that's saying a lot. I must admit that I had become jaded about Kennedy brothers' legacy over the years (and Talbot doesn't ignore JFK's reckless personal behavior), but Talbot gave me a new appreciation of just how wise and farsighted JFK and RFK were, especially given the tenor of the times they lived in.