The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is celebrating this month the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration, amid an ongoing struggle between historians and the Kennedy family over the still-secret files of the president’s brother, Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968.

 

Hidden away in a vault at the Kennedy library in Dorchester are more than 50 boxes of records that even the head of the library cannot review. The documents reportedly contain important information from Robert Kennedy’s service as attorney general, including details about his roles in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and as coordinator of the clandestine mission to remove Fidel Castro as the leader of Cuba.

 

Robert Kennedy’s ninth child, Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, controls access to his late father’s papers, in an effort to maintain RFK’s image as a champion of civil rights and an opponent of the Vietnam War.

 

If opened to the public, the records might reveal another side of the man: a “ruthless anticommunist who broke laws in the quest to take out Cuba’s leader, and perhaps other abuses of power,” wrote Bryan Bender in The Boston Globe.

 

“Obviously this was not the sort of thing [Robert Kennedy] wanted to come out,” Sheldon Stern, former director of the Kennedy library’s American History Project, told the Globe. “The Kennedys are especially sensitive about this stuff.”

 

Philip Brenner, co-author of Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Secret Struggle with the Superpower after the Missile Crisis, told the Globe that the desire for secrecy may have to do with the reason President Kennedy made the unusual decision to put responsibility for his most important foreign policy initiative in the hands of his attorney general. Covert operatives were moving in and out of Miami. “It involved the violation of so many domestic laws you needed the top law enforcement officer to oversee it,’’ said Brenner. “They did not go through customs and that’s violation of the law. Robert Kennedy could make sure the FBI or Immigration and Naturalization Service didn’t interfere.’’

-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

 

A Dark Corner of Camelot (by Bryan Bender, Boston Globe)