John McCone was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. John Kiriakou recounts an account given to him by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.[1][2]
The Hickory Hill driveway exchange
The account John Kiriakou attributes to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and has retold many times, turns on a single question and a single answer.
The context Kiriakou supplies first: the Kennedys and the McCones were close, both families devoutly Catholic. Mrs. McCone had died of breast cancer six months earlier, and the Kennedys were genuinely worried that McCone might harm himself — so they had him over to dinner at Hickory Hill, the family’s estate in McLean, Virginia, which Kiriakou describes as a forty-acre spread with a mansion at the top of the hill. After dinner McCone and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. would swim together. How often the dinners happened varies across Kiriakou’s tellings, from several nights a week to every night of the week to seven nights a week.[3][4][5][6][7][8]
On the afternoon of 22 November 1963, Kennedy Jr. was collected from his school in McLean early by his mother — around half past two, minutes after the assassination in Dallas — and driven home. As they pulled into the driveway his father was standing there talking with McCone, the Director of Central Intelligence. Walking past them, the boy heard his father say: “Tell me your people didn’t do this.” McCone answered: “I don’t know who did it.”[2][9][10][11][12][8]
Kiriakou has given Kennedy Jr.’s age at the time differently across tellings — nine or ten in one account, eleven or twelve in another.[13][14]
What Kiriakou takes from the answer
The weight Kiriakou places on the anecdote rests entirely on what McCone did not say. “He didn’t say, ‘Of course my people didn’t do it.’ He said, ‘I don’t know who did it.’”[15][16] He puts the objection in the form of a question — why would you even ask such a thing, and why would that be the answer?[16]
From it he draws a bounded conclusion: “I think that with what we know now, I think it’s safe to assume that there were elements of the CIA. It was not an official, formal CIA policy … I think there were elements of the CIA that were probably involved.”[17] He distinguishes this from Kennedy Jr.’s own position, which he reports as a settled belief that it was the CIA.[16]
Kiriakou told Kennedy Jr. that the recollection was historical and that he should write it down, because the American people needed to hear it.[18]
”Tell me your people didn’t do this”
Kiriakou names McCone first, and without hesitation, when asked for an example of a good CIA director — the only one he can name outright, with Stansfield Turner added as a hesitant second. Both, he says, are regarded inside the agency as failures “because they tried to rein the organization in.”[19][20]
He attributes to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — “a friend of mine, please don’t judge me for that” — a first-hand account from the day of the assassination. The McCones were close friends of the Kennedys; Mrs. McCone had died of breast cancer six months earlier, and the family, worried that the director was depressed enough to take his own life, had been having him to dinner seven nights a week, after which he and Robert Kennedy Sr. would swim in the pool. Twenty minutes after the shooting, Kennedy Jr.’s mother collected him from school; pulling into the driveway he saw his father standing with Director McCone, and heard him say: “Tell me your people didn’t do this.” McCone’s answer, as Kiriakou relays it, was “I don’t know who did it” — and it is the form of the answer he draws attention to: “He did not say, ‘Of course my people didn’t do it. Are you crazy?’”[21][22][23]