Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's widow says John F. Kennedy's Jr.'s magazine should not have published an article by the mother of her husband's assassin.
"How, of all people, could he do such a thing?" Leah Rabin asked Tuesday of the son of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. "Perhaps he needed a sensational piece in order to sell his paper."Writing in the March issue of George, Kennedy said he believed the article was offered to his political magazine in hopes that "my family history would bring added attention to their story."
But he also described the piece as "clearly the view of an anguished mother and a staunch right-winger" and not "an objective examination of the events surrounding the assassination."
A spokeswoman for the magazine said Tuesday that Kennedy's editorial statement accompanying the article speaks for itself.
In the article, Geula Amir writes that her son, Yigal Amir, a nationalist Jew, was goaded to shoot Rabin on Nov. 5, 1995, by a right-wing agitator who actually was an undercover agent for Shin Bet, Israel's security agency.
She speculates that Shin Bet may have expected an attack but thought it would be done with a doctored gun. The security force let the attack happen so they could take credit for saving the prime minister, she suggests.
"But something went terribly wrong. The bullets were not blanks, the gun was not a toy," Geula Amir writes.
Leah Rabin, who was in Washington to promote her new book, "Our Life, His Legacy," about herself, her husband and Israel, said she normally doesn't talk about the killer but made an exception to denounce the article. She said Kennedy crossed the "red line" of journalism.