US Republicans and US oil industry interests either directly or effectively eliminated John and Robert Kennedy from helping put the United States on a reasonable, just and sustainable course for the future. They got Texas' Lyndon Johnson to bat for their oil and militarist interests, then initiated the take-down of Nixon as Nixon's innate distrust of the U.S. Eastern Establishment (Nixon's misplaced trust in GHW Bush** aside) re-surfaced following his ascent to the presidency in 1969.
Actually, when Republican oil/intelligence interests couldn't get Nixon to pick their man GHW Bush in 1968 instead of Spiro Agnew for the VP slot, they started the clock on Nixon.
The uber-fascist Republican/oil lobby got war-criminal Henry Kissinger hard-wired into Jimmy Carter's presidency; a feat akin akin to putting a psychopath on a pulpit to foster ethics and morality. After more than 25 yrs of these U.S fascists' overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government of Mossadegh in order to reinstall the pro-US/Britain corporatist, autocratic rule of Shah Pahlavi, these U.S. fascists facilitated exiled Shah Pahlavi's admittance into the United States after he escaped Iran with billion$ stashed in foreign banks, leaving Iran without accounting for his SAVAK/CIA security/intelligence horrors perpetrated on Iranians. The Carter administration had assured the new Iranian government that the Shah would not be allowed in exile in the United States. When this assurance was breached at the insistence of and blackmailing efforts of the Shah's good buddy Kissinger, most every politically cognizant person in the world knew the Iranians would be furious; whereupon, in very short order, Iranian civilians took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
As the period of the takeover, hostage situation, was growing, the same U.S. Repug/oil industry fascists who put down the red carpet for the exiled Shah's entry into the U.S., in collusion with fascist Israel's Mossad and fascist Afrikaner South Africa, willfully committed treason against the U.S. government by covertly negotiating with Ayatollah's Iran for the release of U.S. hostages to ensure Iran would not negotiate with the Carter administration for the hostages' release, the latter being an actuality that would most likely have contributed to the re-election of Jimmy Carter in 1980, then conceivably a world that would never have experienced the terrorUSt$ reign of Ronald Reagan and the Bush Dynasty.
Barak Obama's being for going on two years in the same, if not more unenviable, position as were the Kennedys and Carter with respect to not being in partnership with U.S. fascist imperialists and their designs on the world, is a modern day wonder. The history of the United States is one of U.S. fascists never losing, unless 'losing' can be a case like Vietnam's 'victory' in "The American War" wherein U.S. fascists (not whatsoever to mean fascist pawns such as were the average drafted/enlisted U.S. foot-soldier of whom terrorUSt$ bombers like the fascist John McCain was not) relinquished territory because there was nothing left to destroy, no one left who could persuaded by threat of being murdered.
-** Family of Secrets by Russ Baker
........