Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General at the time, had spent the morning of November 22, 1963, at a Justice Department conference on fighting against organized crime and had invited U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau and an aide, back to his home, Hickory Hill in McLean, Va., for a private lunch.
In an interview, US Attorney Robert Morgenthau recalled that at 1:45 pm, Bobby got the call. Kennedy’s wife Ethel called over to him and told him FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was on the line. Kennedy raced over to the phone and heard the devastating news.
“Jack’s been shot in Dallas,” said Kennedy. “It may be fatal.”
Bobby also uttered the prophetic words “I knew they’d get one of us, I thought it would be me.”
There is no indication that Robert Kennedy found evidence to prove a wider conspiracy, his actions after hearing the news of the assassination, show that he focused his attention on “three areas of suspicion”: Cuba, the Mafia and the CIA. In the hours and days immediately following his Jack’s death, Bobby called a Secret Service agent to make sure there was a priest at his brother’s side, called Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to arrange transport for him to Dallas, called family members, and took a call from John McCone, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to Schlesinger’s biography, “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” although McCone would come to believe there had been two shooters involved in the assassination, he didn’t think the CIA was in any way involved.
“But McCone almost certainly didn’t know the whole truth,” the Globe writes. “In the wake of the Bay of Pigs, the botched attempted invasion of Cuba orchestrated by the CIA, JFK had forced out the agency’s founding director, Allen Dulles, and replaced him with McCone, an outsider. At the same time, the president put his brother in charge of trying to ride herd on the powerful and unwieldy intelligence agency while also overseeing the administration’s interdepartmental Cuba team. The attorney general often began his days with meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley.”
Robert Kennedy would later call Julius Draznin, a Chicago attorney for the National Labor Relations Board.
The Globe reports: “Bobby knew Draznin had impeccable mob sources, so he asked him to do some digging to determine if there had been any Mafia involvement in the assassination. ‘I called him back in a couple of days,’ Draznin later told Evan Thomas, author of “Robert Kennedy: His Life.” ‘There was nothing.’”
Bobby looked but never was able to tie the assassination to anyone but Oswald.