Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy

By Ed Sanders and Rick Veitch

Bobby Kennedy's last campaignan homage to a leader who might have changed history and a reconstruction of the conspiracy to stop him, in a magisterial feat of epic investigative poetry.

June 5, 2018, is the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and there are still unanswered questions about whether his murder was the result of a conspiracy. Broken Glory is a graphic history told in epic verse of Bobby Kennedy's life and times leading up to the fateful 1968 election campaign, with 100 illustrations by artist Rick Veitch.

It encompasses the story of his convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan, as well as a large cast of characters that includes Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Eugene McCarthy, who was the first to challenge the sitting president of his own party in the 1968 election, and it recalls the major events that made 1968 a turning point in American history: the Tet offensive and battle of Hue, followed soon after by the My Lai massacre, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the riots that ensued. The authors illuminate the evidence for a conspiracy, fostered perhaps by elements of the CIA, that fielded a second shooter and made of Sirhan Sirhan a patsy, mirroring the part played by Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that haunted JFK’s younger brother until his dying day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcade
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781628729528

Ed Sanders

Ed Sanders is a poet and performer whose roots go back to the Beats and early Grove Press. He was active in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. He began publishing the mimeographed magazine Fuck You! a Magazine of the Arts in 1962 and in 1965, started the Peace Eye Bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which became a center for countercultural and antiwar activities. He was a founding member of the satiric folk-rock band Fugs and also of the Yippies. He helped found the underground newspaper The East Village Other and wrote numerous articles for the Underground Press network. He has received Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships as well as a poetry fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts. He is the author of numerous works of poetry and nonfiction, including Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems, 1961–1985, winner of an American Book Award, 1968: A History in Verse, and the nonfiction work The Family, about Charles Manson and his dystopic communal family. He lives in Woodstock, New York

Book preview

1967

Intelligence Groups, Likely Also the National Security Agency, Surveilled Robert Kennedy

Early 1967

By 1967 he felt he could lead

a great nation to a better,

more peaceful time track,

plus he hungered

to bring to Justice those

who had killed his brother.

In January of ’67 RFK traveled to England, France, Germany & Italy

where he was greeted with a great stir of approval.

In London, he stayed with Lee Radziwill (Jackie

Kennedy’s sister) and her husband.

January 26, he met with Prime Minister Harold Wilson

at 10 Downing Street.²⁸

In Rome, he saw Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were filming

Cleopatra

He had a 35-minute visit with the Pope, discussing the war in Vietnam.

January 31, 1967,

RFK called on President de Gaulle

who told RFK, "There can be no peace

in Vietnam until the United States

stops the bombing of the North

and announces its intentions to

withdraw its troops."

Withdrawal within a specific time,

maybe even years.

That same day, in the company of an American

embassy official named John Dean

RFK "called on Etienne Manac’h,

director of Asian Affairs for the French Foreign Ministry.

Rome

Manac’h was in frequent contact with reps of

Hanoi & NLF (National Liberation Front).

He told RFK that Hanoi was ready to negotiate

with the US

provided that the bombing cease.

This peace feeler

subsequently appeared

in Newsweek

and LBJ assumed that RFK had leaked it.²⁹

The peace feeler story caused headlines around the globe.

Johnson was angry. When Robert Kennedy returned to DC,

Johnson on February 6 asked him in at once for a meeting.

There was an angry confrontation at the White House.

RFK denied he had leaked the peace feeler to the media.

(Time magazine wrote a story on the argument.)

Kennedy told the angry LBJ

"I think the leak came from someone

in your State Department,"

to which the angry one replied,

"It’s not my department, God damn it,

it’s your State Department."³⁰

Walt Rostow and Nicholas Katzenbach, high LBJ aides, were in the room

during the Johnson-Kennedy tiff.

Johnson apparently threatened RFK along the following lines:

"The blood of American boys will be on your hands.

I could attack you in exactly those words, and if I