May 27, 2004
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated
on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War in 1968.
Sirhan Sirhan: Assassin of Modern U.S. History
by Denise Noe
Sirhan Sirhan did not set out with any grand plan to change U.S. history. He
simply wanted to kill Robert F. Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy's support of
Israel. As it turned out, Sirhan's assassination of Robert F. Kennedy -- on June
5, 1968, the first anniversary of the Six Day War -- would do more to alter the
flow of U.S. history than even the assassination of President John Kennedy
accomplished four years earlier. Although both assassinations would have
profound and untold impact for decades to come, Sirhan's killing of Robert
Kennedy would lead in a matter of months to the election of Richard Nixon as
president, the escalation of the Vietnam War and eventually to the national
nightmare of Watergate.
Kennedy, who was gunned down within minutes of winning the California
Democratic presidential primary, would have gone on to win the Democratic
presidential nomination and would, with little doubt, have soundly defeated
Nixon in the general election in November. It is impossible to know what Kennedy
would have accomplished as president, only that the next four to eight years and
beyond would have unraveled in a far different manner.
Sirhan did not just assassinate Robert Kennedy. He assassinated modern U.S.
history.
In 1968, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination was thrown wide
open when President Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation by announcing on March
31 that he would not seek re-election. Earlier that month Sen. Eugene
McCarthy of Minnesota, running as an anti-Vietnam War candidate, had
challenged Johnson in the New Hampshire presidential primary, finishing a
surprising strong second to Johnson there and winning 20 of the state's 24
electoral votes. Once Johnson bowed out, Sen. Robert Kennedy and Vice
President Hubert Humphrey joined the presidential race.
Humphrey was popular but tainted in many people's eyes by his association
with the beleaguered Johnson administration. McCarthy, like Kennedy, wanted to
pull American troops out of the Vietnam conflict so both candidates appealed to
young Democrats. McCarthy lacked the dynamic personality and attractive
background of Kennedy. Much of the luster of "Camelot," the common nickname for
his assassinated brother John F. Kennedy's presidency, clung to the younger
Kennedy. Moreover, many Democrats believed history would repeat itself to the
party's advantage. Richard Nixon was the expected Republican nominee. John F.
Kennedy had defeated him in the 1960 presidential election and RFK supporters
believed another Kennedy would defeat him in the upcoming one.
On the evening of June 4, Kennedy was in the Royal Suite of the Ambassador
Hotel in Los Angeles watching TV as the returns poured in from that day's
California primary. California, with its hefty 174 delegates to the Democratic
convention, was a coveted prize. The candidate sat on a sofa with his wife
Ethel, who was three months pregnant with the couple's eleventh child. Also with
Kennedy were some of his best friends and closest associates, among them
football star Roosevelt Grier and Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson,
aides Pierre Salinger and Ted Sorenson as well as press secretary Fred
Mankiewicz.
According to Robert Blair Kaiser in
"R.F.K. Must Die!"
Kennedy learned
from the major networks that he was winning. "CBS predicted a Kennedy victory by
as much as 16 percentage points," Kaiser wrote. "NBC held out, [but] finally
announced that a sampling of key election precincts, selected in advance to
represent a cross section of the state, also indicated that Kennedy would win."
Buoyed by these predictions, the candidate went to the ballroom shortly
before midnight to make a victory speech. At the end of it, the appreciative
crowd chanted "We want Bobby! We want Bobby!"
A few minutes after midnight, Kennedy went through a side door that would
lead through a crowded food preparation area into the Colonial Room where the
press awaited him. Kaiser wrote that Kennedy was escorted by "an armed security
guard" named Thane Cesar." Cesar "grabbed Kennedy's right arm and started
pushing back the crowd in the pantry with his own right arm."
Suddenly a dark-haired, slightly built young man moved close to the senator.
"Kennedy, you son of a bitch!" he shouted and repeatedly shot a .22 caliber
pistol.
According to Kaiser, "Cesar, the armed security guard, also saw the gun. ‘I
saw a hand sticking out of the crowd,' says Cesar, ‘between two cameramen, and
the hand was holding a gun.' Cesar says he was blinded by the brilliant lights,
moved toward the gun, then saw a red flash come from the muzzle. ‘I ducked,'
says Cesar, ‘because I was as close as Kennedy was. When I ducked, I threw
myself off balance and fell back and when I hit . . . I fell against the
iceboxes and the senator fell down right in front of me."
A maitre d' named Karl Uecker grabbed the arm in which the shooter held the
gun and pressed it down on the steam table beside him even as the gunman
continued to fire. Others, including the powerfully built Rosey Grier and Rafer
Johnson fought with the diminutive but well-muscled assailant and pried the
weapon away from his hand – but not before all eight chambers had been emptied.
Writer George Plimpton was one of those struggling to disarm the assailant.
According to William Klaber and Philip H. Melanson in
Shadow Play: The Murder
of Robert F. Kennedy, the Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American
Justice, Plimpton recalled the gunman as having "enormously peaceful eyes."
Others would see the look of tranquility on the man's face and wonder if he was
hypnotized or drugged.
A wounded Robert Kennedy, shot once in the head and twice through the armpit,
lay flat on the floor. His speechwriter Paul Schrade was also down, struck in
the forehead. Four others were also shot. All, including Schrade, would recover.
Kennedy would not. Surgeons struggled to save him. The senator received blood
transfusions and a tracheotomy was performed to, as Kaiser wrote, "keep his
airway clear of secretions and ensure a steady and adequate supply of oxygen to
the brain." Doctors operated on his brain to remove as much of the bullet as
they could and the blood clot forming as a result of it.
But Kennedy could not be saved. He died at 2 a.m., June 6, at Good Samaritan
Hospital.
The man in custody refused to give police his name. According to
Special
Unit Senator by Robert A. Houghton, he coolly told the questioning officers,
"I wish to remain incognito." However, he did not maintain a stony silence. At
the police station, he spoke with officers on subjects not directly tied to the
reason he was in custody: unrelated murder cases, Harper Lee's To Kill a
Mockingbird, and the stock market. He even asked the police philosophical
questions about the nature of justice.
Police attempted to coax the suspect to identify himself. Kaiser wrote how a
police sergeant asked his name and got no answer. "What's the matter?" the
officer pressed. "Ashamed of what you've done tonight?"
"Hell no!" the prisoner instantly answered.
He had been searched. He carried a column by David Lawrence dated May 26 that
had been clipped out of the Pasadena Independent Star-News in a pocket.
As James W. Clarke wrote in American Assassins, "The title of the column
was ‘Paradoxical Bob.'" In it Lawrence criticized Kennedy for opposing the war
in Vietnam while advocating military aid for Israel.
According to Kaiser, at about 9:15 a.m. June 5, two brothers, Adel and Munir
Sirhan, "were presenting themselves at the Pasadena Police Department" to
identify the man being held for shooting the senator as their brother, Sirhan
Bishara Sirhan. Like them, he was a Palestinian refugee.
Even before the suspected assassin's name was known, the possibility that
others were involved swirled through media reports. Like the killing of Robert's
brother John four years previously, and the slaying of Martin Luther King Jr.
only two months before, the assassination of Robert Kennedy would spawn a
cottage industry of conspiracy theories.
Prominent in such theories is a phantomlike young woman "in a polka dot
dress." According to Klaber and Melanson, Ambassador Hotel employee Vincent
DiPierro told police that prior to the shooting he had seen Sirhan apparently
accompanied by an attractive woman wearing "a white dress with black or purple
polka dots." DiPierro said the woman and Sirhan looked and smiled at each other
in a way that suggested acquaintanceship.
Kennedy campaign worker Sandra Serrano had an even more intriguing story
about a polka dot dress-wearing woman. Kaiser reported what she told homicide
detectives: "She said that during Kennedy's speech she had been out on the fire
escape outside the Embassy Room ‘because it was too hot inside' when three
people came up the fire escape. One of them was a girl in a white dress with
black polka dots, a Caucasian with dark brown . . . With her was a young man of
about 23, perhaps a Mexican-American . . . and another young man with ‘messed-up
clothes and a lot of hair.' Then, said Sandra Serrano, ‘the same girl, about
two, two minutes later, three minutes later maybe, came running down the stairs.
She practically stepped on me, and she said, ‘We've shot him. We've shot him.'
Then I said, ‘Who did you shoot?' and she said, ‘We shot Senator Kennedy.'"
Police suspected the stories told by Serrano and DiPierro. According to
Houghton, Serrano made a long-distance phone call to her mother immediately
after the shooting but never mentioned the polka-dot dress. Houghton also wrote,
"Captain Cecil R. Lynch of the Los Angeles Fire Department had been making the
rounds of various stairways and exits from the Embassy Ballroom to check for
possible fire-law violations that evening of June 4. He had personally inspected
the outside flight of stairs on which Sandra Serrano claimed to have been seated
during Sen. Kennedy's victory speech. Lynch saw no one on the stairs at that
time."
Both DiPierro and Serrano took polygraph tests. Both flunked and admitted
they had fabricated their stories. The police discounted the theory that Sirhan
had a polka-dot dress-wearing accomplice but she continues to haunt conspiracy
scenarios.
Different conspiracy theorists posit different villains. Arab terrorists are
high on the list of theorists' possible conspirators, logically enough given
Sirhan's background. Others believe organized crime was behind the murder. Bobby
Kennedy had drawn the ire of Mob figures when he had acted as an attorney for
the Senate Rackets Committee. Communists, the CIA, extreme right-wingers and
other groups have been suggested as having masterminded the assassination.
In most conspiracy scenarios, Sirhan is a willing
participant, often shooting at the candidate ineffectually so another assassin
can do the actually dirty work of killing. However, some, including Klaber and
Melanson, lean toward the possibility that he was an unwilling dupe, hypnotized
without his knowledge or consent, a kind of real-life "Manchurian Candidate."
The Manchurian Candidate is
a movie directed by John Frankenheimer and released in 1962. It stars Laurence
Harvey, Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury. Harvey plays veteran
Raymond Shaw who was awarded a medal for rescuing a platoon of American soldiers
captured by North Koreans in 1952. Officials do not know that Shaw was himself
one of those captured and that, during his imprisonment, he was hypnotized to
act as an assassin.
This is the scenario Sirhan himself now advocates. His
current attorney, Lawrence Teeter, filed a petition July 24, 2002 challenging
his conviction on the grounds that the late Grant Cooper failed to introduce
evidence of Sirhan's having been "programmed through hypnosis to pull a weapon
and fire it without knowing what he was doing."
The United States Supreme Court turned down this petition.
Despite the plethora of elaborate theories, intense
investigation would only show indisputable links between the assassination of
Robert Kennedy and the individual found with a gun in his hand, Sirhan Bishara
Sirhan. Many conspiracy theorists and his present lawyer see him as a dupe of
shadowy and nefarious forces. The attorneys who defended viewed him as a
disturbed man who acted out of a deep psychological sickness. Facts showed him a
rational assassin who had good reason, from his particular political and
personal perspectives, to hate Senator Kennedy and want him dead.
The Suspect
Sirhan Sirhan was born on March 19, 1944 to an Arab Christian family in
Jerusalem. His father was a highly paid worker with the city's water department
who adequately supported his wife and seven children.
Palestine was a fiercely disputed territory. Governed by Great Britain, the
Zionist movement claimed it as the homeland of the Jewish people. That movement
acquired special urgency in the aftermath of World War II and Hitler's attempted
genocide of the Jews.
Sirhan Sirhan was an infant, then a toddler, in a neighborhood that rang
regularly with hectic shouts, explosions, gunfire, and the anguished cries of
the wounded and the grieving. According to James W. Clarke in American
Assassins, a young Sirhan found the shot body of an Arab neighbor drenched
in fresh blood. The entire Sirhan family saw a British soldier's body freshly
mangled by a bomb and discovered his finger in their yard. Klaber and Melanson
recount him as seeing an explosion resulting in "a little girl's leg blown off,
and the blood spurting from below the knee as though from a faucet."
Clarke noted that Sirhan was only 4 years old when he witnessed a bomb
explode and saw "the street strewn with the bloody, mutilated bodies of Arab
victims." A worse trauma soon followed. Sirhan and an older brother were playing
in the street. Gunfire broke out and a Zionist truck swerved straight into one
of Sirhan's brothers, crushing the child.
After his death, Mary Sirhan forbade her other children to play outdoors. Her
caution was understandable in a land torn apart by war. But it was also
inevitable that growing, energetic youngsters chafed under this restriction.
In 1948, still during Sirhan's fourth year, Zionists attacked a village
called Deir Yassin and massacred 250 people, most of them women, children and
elderly men. Together with the official declaration of Israeli independence, it
led the Sirhans, along with many other terrified Arabs, to flee their homes.
A family that had been comfortably middle-class sank into dire poverty. The
Sirhans shared a tiny home in the Old Walled City part of Jerusalem with two
other uprooted Arab families.
Grotesque violence remained a terrible part of young Sirhan's life. Kaiser
recorded a particularly horrible scene remembered by Mary and Adel Sirhan.
Little Sirhan was screaming as he ran to his family's crowded apartment. He was
carrying a bucket, half-filled with water – and with a human hand floating on
top of it. The sobbing boy was, understandably, "quivering with fright."
Sirhan and his father frequently clashed. According to Klaber and Melanson, a
Palestinian-American named Ziad Hashimeh who had been friends with Sirhan when
they were children called the father a strict disciplinarian. Hashimeh claimed
he had seen Bishara Sirhan strike Sirhan "quite a few times" with both "sticks
and hands" and that Bishara was "too emotional."
Like many Arab refugees, the Sirhans hoped a quick Arab military victory
would restore their lives to normalcy. When that hope faded, the Sirhans sought
to immigrate to the United States. They did in 1956.
The family journeyed to New York, then California. Sirhan was 12 years old
when he set foot on American soil. As an adult, Sirhan would testify in court
that he had experienced trepidation about moving because he "wanted to stay in
my own country . . . with my own people."
Despite his reluctance to immigrate, adjusting to life in the new country
seemed to be easier for Sirhan than some of his other family members. He had
that most valuable attribute of the immigrant – facility with languages. He
received adequate, although not good, grades and made friends in school.
After seven months in the United States, Bishara Sirhan abandoned his family
to return to the Middle East.
Mary Sirhan got a job, as did Sirhan's older brother Aden. Thirteen-year-old
Sirhan helped out by taking on a paper route.
In high school, the seemingly well-adjusted Sirhan joined the officer cadet
corps and was elected to the student council in both his junior and senior
years. Kaiser recorded Sirhan's brother, Munir, as saying that during this
period Sirhan discovered a fondness for target shooting.
Sirhan's sister, Ayda, to whom he had always been especially close, became
ill with leukemia soon after Sirhan entered college. He often skipped classes to
help her and racked up a series of poor grades. She died before he was dismissed
from college in 1964.
Continuing to live with his family, Sirhan got a job as a gas station
attendant, then a gardener. In 1965, he became a stable boy at the Santa Anita
racetrack. In between shoveling hay and sweeping up manure, he daydreamed of
being a jockey. The goal was realistic for an athletic man of 5'5" weighing 120
pounds. One morning in September 1966 Sirhan was riding a horse to exercise it.
He fell and the dream of becoming a jockey crashed to the dirt with him. He
tried getting back in the saddle but had lost the nerve that a jockey needs.
He took a job clerking in a health food store.
He had another interest: guns. On Aug. 10, 1965, according to Robert Blair
Kaiser's "R.F.K. Must Die!" Sirhan acquired a .22 Iver-Johnson revolver
that he used for target shooting. Kaiser wrote that it is likely that his
brother Munir purchased the pistol and gave it to Sirhan.
On the morning of June 4, 1968, Sirhan's name would be on the roster of the
San Gabriel Valley Gun Club's as one of those using the shooting range that day.
As an Arab Christian, he was attracted to the pan-Arabism (rather than
Islamic militancy) preached by Egypt's Gamal Abdal Nasser. Thus, he had a
special reason to be emotionally devastated when Nasser's forces and those of
his Arab allies were so easily vanquished by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War that
started June 5, 1967 and was over by June 10.
Occultism caught Sirhan's interest. Klaber and Melanson wrote that "Sirhan
fervently embraced the realm of the mind: self-hypnosis, mind control,
mysticism. He practiced the mental projection of images and ideas. He frequented
one Pasadena bookstore that specialized in the occult and got a part-time job at
another. There he read books he could not afford to buy, books with titles like
The Laws of Mental Domination, Thought Power: Its Control and Culture and
Meditations on the Occult Life: The Hidden Power.
"Sirhan also joined the Rosicrucians, a self-described ‘ancient mystical
order.' In May 1968 he paid $20 to join after seeing an ad in a newspaper."
It was also during this period that Sirhan began keeping a journal. It is a
most bizarre work. One indication of its strangeness is that it can be read in
radically divergent ways. The prosecutors, as well as writers like Clarke,
believe it conclusively proves rational premeditation. Psychiatrists who
testified on his behalf thought it showed he was incapable of it. Others like
Klaber and Melanson think it supports the hypothesis that he was the unwitting
dupe of others.
In an entry dated "May 18," he wrote, "My determination to
eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more the more of and unshakable obsession [sic]."
Why did Sirhan want to "eliminate" Bobby Kennedy? Clarke
wrote of Sirhan, "there is little doubt that he read in the Arab papers that
The New York Times reported on January 9 and 10, 1968, Sen. Kennedy's
proposed sale of 50 Phantom jet bombers to Israel." Actually, President Johnson
had negotiated the plan and Kennedy merely said he would honor it.
Kennedy had long been an outspoken supporter of Israel.
The phrasing of the May 18 journal entry indicates that Sirhan had been planning
to kill Kennedy for quite awhile before putting it on paper. Moreover, Kennedy's
intention to send bombers to Israel had been reported much earlier in the year,
as was his belief that America should supply Israel with "whatever assistance is
necessary to preserve Israel's borders and protect the integrity of its people."
Later in his journal, Sirhan declared, "Robert F. Kennedy
must be assassinated by 5 June 68." That date was significant because it was the
first anniversary of the Six-Day War as well as the day after the California
presidential primary. According to Clarke, "Sirhan later explained to author
Robert Kaiser: ‘June 5 stood out for me, sir, more than my own birth date. I
felt Robert Kennedy was coinciding his own appeal for votes with the anniversary
of the Six Day War."
Other entries in Sirhan's diary read: "RFK must die RFK
must die Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated must be assassinated." These
phrases and many others repeat like lines from a broken record.
At his trial, the defense explained them as the product of
a broken mind.
A Tangled Defense
Heading the defense team, all of whom took Sirhan's case
pro bono, was 65-year-old Grant Cooper. A prominent attorney, Cooper was
considered, as Klaber and Melanson put it, "at the top of his profession."
Seventy-five-year-old Russell Parsons, another lawyer with a fine reputation,
would also defend Sirhan. Joining the defense the day before trial began was
Emile Zola Berman. Klaber and Melanson wrote, "Berman was a Jew, and Cooper
thought that might help in defending an Arab in a case with political
overtones."
Chief Deputy District Attorney Lynn "Buck" Compton led the
prosecution. Deputy district attorneys John Howard and David Fitts assisted
Compton.
Judge Herbert Walker presided over the trial. The
bespectacled, white-haired jurist had been born in 1899 and enjoyed a reputation
as an impartial judge.
The defense conceded that Sirhan had killed Kennedy but
said he could not be guilty of first-degree murder because he suffered from a
"diminished mental capacity" that prevented him from "maturely and meaningfully"
premeditating the crime as was necessary for a verdict of first-degree murder
under California law. They hoped for a verdict of second-degree murder that
would spare him the death penalty.
Sirhan himself appeared deeply conflicted about a mental
defense. He often seemed, by both actions and words, to accept the prosecution
premise that he had assassinated out of rational political motives.
Prior to the beginning of the trial, Cooper had made a
motion to quash Sirhan's indictment by challenging the representative nature of
the grand jury's make up. Sirhan was called to the witness stand to testify
about his poor financial status. As he took the oath, Sirhan raised an arm with
a clenched fist over his head. This was obviously in imitation of the black
power salute that U.S. sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos had given at the
Olympics a few months previously.
When called to testify in his own defense at this trial,
Sirhan again took the oath with an upraised arm and clenched fist.
During his testimony, Cooper asked Sirhan how he had felt
toward his victim's older brother, President John Kennedy.
The witness replied, "I loved him, sir, more than any
American would have."
Cooper asked him to explain and Sirhan said, "Because just
a few weeks before his assassination he was working, sir, with the leaders of
the Arab government, the Arab countries, to bring a solution, sir, to the
Palestinian refugee problem, and he promised these Arab leaders that he would do
his utmost and his best to force or to put some pressure on Israel, sir, to
comply with the 1948 United Nations Resolution, sir, to either repatriate those
Arab refugees or give them back, give them the right to return to their homes.
And when he was killed, sir, that never happened."
Sirhan testified that he had no memory of the killing of
Robert Kennedy. Nor did he have any recollection of wanting to kill Kennedy or
of writing in his notebook of such a plan. However, he agreed that he must have
killed the senator.
His being at the Ambassador was a matter of happenstance,
he testified, rather than conscious planning. He had been eating at a Bob's Big
Boy, reading a newspaper. One ad caught his eye. As Klaber and Melanson wrote,
it was "for the ‘Miracle March for Israel,' a parade on Wilshire Boulevard to
celebrate the Israeli victory over the Arabs in the Six-Day War a year earlier.
Sirhan told Cooper that just seeing the ad gave him ‘a burning feeling inside.'"
He drove to where the parade was going to take place.
Perhaps because he was upset, he had failed to notice that the celebration was
scheduled for the next day. As Klaber and Melanson reported, "Instead of a
parade, all Sirhan found was a storefront campaign party for U.S. senatorial
candidate Thomas Kuchel. Sirhan stopped in and overheard that there were several
larger parties going on at the Ambassador Hotel, a short distance away. He made
his way to the Ambassador."
There he downed several Tom Collins drinks. He wandered
around, then went back to his car. Deciding he was too drunk to drive, he went
back to the hotel to get some coffee to sober up. Around a coffee urn, he saw a
"beautiful" young woman.
The defendant claimed he next remembered "being choked."
He had no memory of getting his gun from his car but said he "must have."
When questioned about his notebooks, Sirhan acknowledged
that the handwriting was his so he must have written them but said he had no
memory of writing in them and could not account for the repetitive entries.
On cross-examination, Sirhan said "I'm not even aware that
I killed Mr. Kennedy," then "I know he's dead. I've been told that." He said he
was "not glad" the senator was dead but "not sorry" because he had "no exact
knowledge, sir, of having shot him."
At one point early in the trial, Sirhan wanted to abandon
his defense. Trembling and gripping the sides of his chair, Sirhan told Judge
Walker he wanted to plead guilty, "disassociate" himself from his counsel, and
"ask to be executed." When asked why, Sirhan said, "I killed Robert Kennedy
willfully, premeditatively, with 20 years of malice aforethought."
According to Klaber and Melanson, Sirhan's action was
triggered because he thought two women whom he had had crushes on were going to
be called as witnesses. Assured he was wrong, he took his lawyers back and
allowed the trial to continue.
Clinical psychologist Martin Schorr testified for the
defense. He said Sirhan suffered a "paranoid psychosis" and that he was probably
in a "dissociate state" when he killed Kennedy.
On cross-examination, D.A. John Howard had Schorr read
from the report he had made on Sirhan. That report gave a rigidly Oedipal
interpretation in which, "By killing Kennedy, Sirhan kills his father, takes his
father's place as the heir to the mother." It must have sounded suspicious to
many listeners. The liberal American presidential candidate would seem a poor
stand-in for Sirhan's strict Arab father.
This report, fishy on the face of it, became laughable
when Howard showed that it seemed to have been lifted almost word-for-word from
Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist by James A. Brussel. According to Klaber
and Melanson, Grant Cooper said he "could have crawled under a table" during
Howard's withering cross-examination of Schorr.
Another clinical psychologist, Dr. Orville Richardson,
followed Schorr to the stand. Reading from his report, Richardson
testified that Sirhan suffered "a very severe emotional and mental disturbance,"
that "his personality is highly fragile" and that he was "subject to episodes of
acute and rapid deterioration."
When Richardson discussed test results that had led him to
his conclusions, he seemed peculiarly unconvincing. He had given Sirhan a "test
of similarities." Klaber and Melanson reported, "To the question how a banana
and an orange are alike Sirhan said, ‘You have to peel them before you eat
them,' instead of ‘They are fruit.' He said, "A coat and a dress are alike
because they are both worn,' instead of ‘They are clothing.' He said an ax and a
saw . . . cut wood' rather than ‘They are tools.'"
Klaber and Melanson comment quite astutely: "To Richardson
these responses were ‘indicative of impairment, some fracture in his
intellectual process.' But to a member of the jury it may have seemed as though
Dr. Richardson was reaching, for Sirhan's answers might well have been
considered superior. That a saw and an ax both cut wood is a more distinguishing
similarity than the fact that they are both tools. The same would be true of
Sirhan's answer concerning the orange and the banana."
Dr. Bernard Diamond testified that Sirhan admitted killing
Kennedy whom he regarded as an enemy of the Arab people but claimed he had no
recollection of either the shooting or writing in his notebooks. After putting
Sirhan under hypnosis several times, Diamond concluded that Sirhan had
previously been hypnotized, probably self-hypnotized, and that those
self-induced trances led to the assassination.
"With absolutely no knowledge or awareness of what was
actually happening in his Rosicrucian and occult experiments," Diamond
explained, "[Sirhan] was gradually programming himself . . . for the coming
assassination." The programming took place in "his unconscious mind" while "in
his conscious mind there was no awareness of such a plan." Diamond accepted
Sirhan's claim that he had not planned to kill RFK June 4, 1968 but had found
himself by happenstance at the Ambassador Hotel. There "the mirrors in the hotel
lobby, the flashing lights, the general confusion" put him "back in his trances"
and in this "almost accidentally induced twilight state he actually executed the
crime."
The jury deliberated three days. On April 17, 1969, they
found Sirhan guilty of first-degree murder. On May 21, Judge Walker sentenced
Sirhan to be executed in California's gas chamber. Sirhan spent about three
years on death row before the California Supreme Court abolished capital
punishment in 1972. Today, the aging convict -- now in his early 60s -- is in
California's Corcoran State Prison.
Conspiracies and a "Manchurian Candidate"
"Special Unit Senator," a group formed by the Los Angeles
Police Department, investigated conspiracy allegations in the immediate
aftermath of Sen. Kennedy's death. Its investigation concluded that Sirhan acted
alone.
But it could not lay doubts to rest. Conspiracy buffs
found enough unexplained items to buttress their theories.
Witnesses in the pantry differed grossly in their
estimates of how close Sirhan got to Kennedy. As Andrew David wrote in
Famous
Criminal Trials, "Some witnesses said Sirhan's gun was as much as 10 feet
away from Senator Kennedy when it was fired. Others said it was as close as two
feet." But at least one shot was made at point blank range. It was also made to
the back of his head and no one remembered him turning his head to his killer.
The one person who was known to have been close to
Kennedy, within point blank range and armed was security guard Thane Cesar and
many have pointed fingers at him. A conservative, Cesar had a strong dislike for
the Kennedys. Moreover, as Juliet Ching wrote in
The Assassination of Robert
F. Kennedy, "A witness saw Cesar pull out his gun and fire at Sirhan." Some
have speculated that he actually shot Kennedy. Of course, it should be pointed
out that only one witness claims to have seen Cesar fire his gun and that the
security guard said, as Klaber and Melanson recorded, that he only "displayed
his gun."
Klaber and Melanson also reported that journalist Dan
Moldea interviewed Cesar in 1989 and persuaded him to submit to a polygraph
about his actions during the RFK assassination. According to Klaber and Melanson,
"Cesar passed the test. Moldea subsequently concluded that Cesar had not
participated in the assassination."
That no eyewitness can recall seeing Sirhan get close
enough to RFK to inflict a wound to the back of his head is probably the result
of the circumstances of crowding, confusion, blocked vision, and terror.
Sirhan's faulty memory is, in all likelihood, a way to
distance himself from the crime. His emphatic "Hell, no!" when asked if he was
"ashamed of what [he] had done" strongly suggests that he knew what that
something was.
Klaber and Melanson believe he "did not behave like a
political assassin" since he did not immediately proclaim his political motive.
They think a politically motivated killer would have proudly given the reasons
for the killing rather than hiding behind amnesia.
This seeming dichotomy can be seen as the reasonable
result of Sirhan's understanding of his two cultures, the Arab for which he
killed and the American in which he was tried. He believed his fellow Arabs
would see his actions as political – as indeed they did. Klaber and Melanson
noted that in the aftermath of the assassination Sirhan's "likeness [appeared]
on tens of thousands of Al Fatah posters; the ambassador of the Palestinian UN
delegation attends his trail; [and] he receive [d] adoring letters from
Palestinian girls."
In America, Sirhan knew he had no chance of escaping
conviction and a death sentence if he simply admitted in court he was
politically motivated but might if a jury were convinced he was not completely
mentally responsible. Saying he could not remember the planning or commission of
his crime made perfect sense from that perspective.
Klaber and Melanson, among others, found his assertion
that, "I murdered Robert Kennedy with 20 years malice aforethought" indicative
of a distorted mind "since he obviously was not planning to murder Robert
Kennedy when he was 4 years old."
They ignore its implications. Kaiser quotes his attorney
Emile Berman was saying, "If we're speaking about a psychiatric defense, that
means going back to the time when he was 4 years old." The 4-year-old Sirhan had
fled with his family from their home after the Deir Yassin massacre and the
Israeli declaration of independence. It was the defining trauma for him along
with his fellow Palestinians. For most of his life, that grievance had festered
inside him like an unhealed wound. That wound had been torn open and rubbed with
salt when the Arabs were defeated with dismaying swiftness in the Six-Day War.
He took revenge for it on June 5, 1968 with the assassination of the pro-Israel
senator and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy.
