“JFK was killed in November 1963. By sixty-four, Bobby was out on his ass. LBJ hated him. Bobby ran for senator in New York and won, no big deal. But in March of 1968, Eugene McCarthy entered a primary against LBJ and damn near won. There was blood in the water. Everybody knew Johnson was vulnerable because of Vietnam. Four days later, on March sixteenth, Bobby announced he was running for president. Can you imagine how Carlos Marcello reacted when he heard that?”

“He probably shot a hole in his TV, Elvis-style.”

Henry can barely contain his excitement. “Carlos vowed RFK would never be president. Then he talked to his old buddy Brody Royal. I can just hear the classic Sicilian line: Will someone take this stone from my shoe? According to my source, Marcello was thinking of a patsy setup, like with Oswald. But Frank Knox had been thinking about this kind of hit ever since he founded the Double Eagles. When Brody told Frank what Carlos wanted, Frank said instead of an individual patsy like Oswald, a collective one would work better. The Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, for example. The Ben Chester White case was a perfect setup for it. Those idiots had just chosen the wrong victim, a harmless handyman. Frank knew that if they killed the right black man, Bobby Kennedy would come back to Mississippi to make a campaign speech and commiserate with the widow. Bobby had just visited the Mississippi Delta on his poverty tour the year before.”

This wakes me up. “What made Jimmy Revels the right black man? He was only about twenty-five, wasn’t he?”

“Twenty-six.” Henry gives me a strange smile. “Listen to this. Even though Jimmy and Luther had been in hiding, from the day RFK announced his candidacy, those two had been crisscrossing the state, tirelessly persuading black Mississippi voters to register to vote. He used the chance of voting for John Kennedy’s brother as inspiration, and it was working. Mississippi blacks hadn’t forgotten Bobby holding those sick and starving Delta babies in his lap. Penn, one hour ago, an old NAACP officer informed me that in late March of sixty-eight—probably Monday the twenty-fifth—Bobby Kennedy placed a personal call to the Jackson headquarters of the NAACP and spoke to Jimmy Revels to thank him for his work. They talked for two and a half minutes.”

This I believe. “Henry, when George Metcalfe survived that Klan bomb in 1965, Bobby Kennedy called the Jefferson Davis Hospital in Natchez to talk to Metcalfe personally. I know that because my father was his doctor, and he heard one side of the conversation.”

Henry shakes his head in amazement. “And the hits just keep on comin’. By the way, that was no Klan bomb. The Double Eagles planted that bomb in Metcalfe’s car, and they weren’t even trying to kill him. They were trying to wound him and lure Martin Luther King down here.”