Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

File:Robertkennedy.jpg

Robert Kennedy

The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy occurred in the early hours of June 5, 1968. Kennedy, New York's junior United States Senator and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was fatally wounded by gunshots at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at approximately 12:16 a.m. PDT. He died 25 1/2 hours later at Good Samaritan Hospital. A diary allegedly penned by the convicted gunman, 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, seemed to attribute the assassination to Sirhan's anger over the Senator's support for Israel during and after the Six-Day War. On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles court, Sirhan claimed that he had killed Kennedy. Sirhan has since recanted that claim, and as late as 1998 has sought a new trial.

Background

As a United States senator after having left his previous post as Attorney General of the United States in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presidential administrations, Robert Francis Kennedy focused on issues of social reform and increasingly came to identify with the poor and disenfranchised. He reached out to members of minority groups and formed relationships with many of them.

Kennedy also broke with the Johnson administration over its war policy in Vietnam.

On the same evening he was shot, Senator Kennedy had just won the June 4, 1968 Democratic presidential primaries in South Dakota and California, somewhat boosting but not securing his chances of winning the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in August and the presidential election in November.

Assassination

Four hours after the polling stations closed in California, Robert F. Kennedy claimed victory in that state's Democratic presidential primary. It was shortly after Midnight PDT on June 5, 1968 when Senator Kennedy addressed his campaign supporters from a lectern atop a makeshift platform in the Embassy Room ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, located in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. At 12:15 a.m. PDT, immediately after delivering his victory statement, Kennedy stepped from the lectern, exited the rear of the platform while passing through a set of curtains, and walked through a backstage anteroom and its doorway to a back corridor behind the ballroom. Kennedy then turned right and followed the path of the narrow corridor into a kitchen pantry, where he continued shaking hands with well-wishers and hotel staff. In that pantry, at 12:16 a.m., a 24-year-old man named Sirhan Sirhan stepped in front of the Senator, reportedly exclaimed "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!" and firing two shots toward the candidate and his entourage from an eight-shot handgun, later identified as a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver.

Hotel assistant maître d's Karl Uecker and Edward Minasian, writer George Plimpton, Olympic gold medal decathlete Rafer Johnson and professional football player Rosey Grier were among several people who helped to disarm and detain Sirhan. Sirhan already had fired the remaining six bullets of his eight-shot handgun during the struggle by the time Grier jammed Sirhan's thumb behind the trigger of the revolver to prevent further shots from being fired. Grier had no way of knowing in the confusion that all the revolver's bullets had been fired.

As Kennedy lay wounded on the floor of the hotel kitchen pantry, busboy Juan Romero cradled the Senator's head and placed a rosary in his hand. This became the iconic image of the assassination.

Kennedy had been shot twice in his back and once behind his right ear at very close range. A fourth shot had passed through the Senator's clothing. Reporters and others crammed the narrow kitchen pantry, trying to gather information, as television film cameramen and print photographers captured the images of the bleeding Kennedy lying on the pantry floor.

Television coverage

Although Senator Kennedy's speech in the ballroom had been broadcast live on television and radio, the shooting in the kitchen pantry was not aired live; nor was it videotaped or filmed. None of the huge television cameras that were used in those days to relay live pictures were stationed inside the pantry when the shots erupted there; these cameras were set up in other areas of the Ambassador Hotel, such as the Embassy Room ballroom where Kennedy had made his speech, the Ambassador Room ballroom one floor below and the lobby area. Some cameramen with shoulder-carried film cameras were able to get inside the pantry moments after the shooting but the film cameramen could only record the shooting aftermath images onto film, not relay those images live.

CBS Television had concluded its live anchored coverage of the California primary an hour before Kennedy was shot but it had continued providing a live, un-anchored network feed directly from the Ambassador Hotel so that CBS affiliates, particularly those in California, could air the live pictures if they so desired. In the moments after Kennedy had left the ballroom's lectern, CBS had continued feeding live pictures of the Embassy Room ballroom; although, by that time, it's believed that only a few CBS affiliates, if any at all, were still airing the network's feed of live pictures from the hotel. For the next two minutes, CBS cameras panned the crowd in that ballroom as well as another crowd of supporters downstairs in the hotel's Ambassador Room ballroom. The Embassy Room crowd was dispersing following Kennedy's victory statement, while the Ambassador Room crowd was milling and chanting, "RFK! RFK! RFK!" in anticipation that the Senator was about to come downstairs to address them as well.

As microphones picked up the sound of supporters in the lower Ambassador Room chanting "Kennedy, Kennedy, rah, rah, rah! Kennedy, Kennedy, shish, boom, bah!", a CBS camera upstairs showed supporters in the Embassy Room reacting to the shooting that had just taken place, off-camera, in the kitchen pantry just off the Embassy Room.

While CBS's audio feed switched from the Ambassador Room to match the pictures of alarm in the Embassy Room, the upper ballroom's northside service doors leading to the pantry could be seen swinging open and the sounds of screaming and chaos could be heard. It was clear that the joyous crowd was now overcome with confusion and, in some cases, panic.

CBS News correspondent Terry Drinkwater, standing at the lectern where Kennedy had just spoken, asked someone what had happened. An unidentified man answered, "Somebody said he's been shot". Drinkwater then advised his CBS colleagues to make sure they were rolling videotape. From the lectern, supporters called out for doctors, and Kennedy's brother-in-law Stephen Smith (with wife Jean Kennedy Smith at his side) calmly asked the crowd to leave the room.

CBS newsman Roger Mudd, who had been at the Ambassador covering the California primary along with Drinkwater, followed the ambulance to Central Receiving Hospital where Kennedy had been first taken, then to Good Samaritan Hospital to continue his on-the-spot coverage. CBS began anchored coverage of the assassination with anchor Joseph Benti at around 12:35 a.m. PDT. Also initially reporting from the CBS newsroom in New York in the first hours following the shooting was Mike Wallace. Walter Cronkite eventually joined Benti as co-anchor on the network's anchor set.

The ABC television network had been in the process of signing off when word of the shooting arrived. A staff announcer awkwardly advised stations to stand by for further word from the network while ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith and political analyst Bill Lawrence received confirmation in New York concerning the situation in Los Angeles. Within moments, ABC was back on the air with Smith announcing news of the Kennedy shooting to viewers at 12:21 a.m. PDT.

Minutes later, ABC aired a live audio report from KABC TV reporter Carl George, inside the kitchen pantry, beginning just before Kennedy was wheeled from the kitchen on a gurney. A visibly shaken ABC News Correspondent Dave Jayne provided details on the wounds to his colleague Bill Weisel, an ABC employee who had been among bystanders also shot. Both Jayne and Weisel had been standing near the pantry's swinging doors, several feet from Kennedy, at the time of the shooting. ABC's primary correspondent at the Ambassador, Bob Clark, had heard the shots from the Embassy Room and rushed to the pantry, where he observed a wounded Robert Kennedy lying on the pantry floor. Clark then rushed back to the ballroom to call his network's headquarters in New York. Coincidentally, Clark had been the ABC reporter riding in the Dallas motorcade during the assassination of John F. Kennedy and now became the only person ever to see both wounded Kennedy brothers just moments after each was shot. After speaking by phone with ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith, Clark was dispatched to Central Receiving Hospital much as he had been rushed to Parkland Hospital in his press follow-up car five years earlier. After Senator Kennedy was transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital, less than an hour after the shooting, Clark began providing live reports on Kennedy's condition from Good Samaritan.

On NBC, newsman Charles Quinn had been wrapping up a live television report from the hotel's Embassy Room at the very moment Kennedy and others were being shot inside the kitchen pantry. Quinn, unaware of the shooting, tossed back to NBC anchor Frank McGee in Burbank as previously planned. The network originally had intended for McGee to then toss to co-anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley for a few moments and for McGee to finally close out the program. Word of a possible shooting at the Ambassador changed those plans and, instead of wrapping up NBC's primary coverage, the anchors stretched their on-air comments while off-air efforts were made to confirm the alarming information. When NBC believed it had sufficient confirmation that Kennedy indeed had been shot, McGee broke that news to viewers at 12:26 a.m. PDT and NBC began its own live coverage of the shooting aftermath.

Audio recordings

Reporter Andrew West of KRKD, a Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate in Los Angeles, captured on audio tape the sounds of the immediate aftermath of the shooting but not the actual shooting itself. Using a reel-to-reel tape recorder and attached microphone, West also provided an on-the-spot account of the struggle with Sirhan Sirhan in the hotel kitchen pantry, shouting at Rafer Johnson to "Get the gun, Rafer, get the gun!" and telling others to "get ahold of [Sirhan's] thumb and break it, if you have to! Get his thumb!" .

Earlier, while still on the ballroom stage just after Kennedy's speech, Andy West had briefly asked the Senator how he would overcome Vice President Hubert Humphrey's lead in obtaining delegate commitments to the Democratic National Convention. In a response that seems somewhat garbled in West's recording, Kennedy indicated he knew that a "struggle" still lay ahead of him in his quest for his party's presidential nomination. Following the Senator's response to West's question, the radio reporter switched his tape recorder off. Moments later, as he was following the Kennedy party into the kitchen area, West heard what sounded like balloons popping, followed by a scream and then shouts that Kennedy had been shot. West quickly turned his tape recorder back on, recording the immediate aftermath of the assassination but just missing the actual shots that had just been fired.

Pruszynski recording

Decades later, it was discovered that the shots in the kitchen pantry had been recorded on audio tape by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a freelance newspaper reporter who was covering Senator Kennedy's presidential campaign for the Montreal Gazette and today resides in his native Poland. Pruszynski had made the recording with a battery-powered portable cassette tape recorder and an attached microphone. Pruszynski's tape has become the only known sound recording of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and analysis of it has only just begun. On February 21, 2008, scientific results that conclude the recording reveals a second gun in the assassination were presented at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington DC for further study and peer review.

On June 6, 2007, the newly-discovered Pruszynski recording was the centerpiece for a television program about the Kennedy case on Discovery Times Channel, now known as Investigation Discovery Channel. The one-hour documentary, entitled Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination, provided evidence from the recording that convicted gunman Sirhan Sirhan had not acted alone. Pruszynski's audio tape, which had never been broadcast in the 39 years since the murder, was aired for the first time during the Discovery Times program. According to three out of four audio experts interviewed for the documentary, the reporter's recording shows that a second gun was fired in the Bobby Kennedy shooting.

Stanislaw Pruszynski and his recording equipment were approximately 40 feet southwest of Senator Kennedy when the shots erupted inside the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry. Pruszynski was unaware that his portable machine was still operating as it captured the sounds of the Kennedy shooting. Pruszynski also was unaware of the shooting itself because it was taking place amidst the various sounds of celebration, some distance away inside another room and outside the reporter's purview.

At that moment, Pruszynski was about to enter a narrow back corridor leading into the pantry from the hotel’s Embassy Room, a ballroom where Kennedy had just delivered his victory statement following the Tuesday, June 4 California Democratic primary election. When the shooting commenced, Pruszynski was at the north side of the ballroom and descending a small set of steps at the east end of the ballroom's makeshift stage where the Senator had spoken. Although he did not know his recorder was still recording at that point, Pruszynski just happened to be holding his microphone tilted upward and pointed toward the pantry, and above the heads of the crowd on the ballroom floor beneath him. Doors between Pruszynski and the shooting were open at the time.

Film and video shot by more than one camera in the Embassy Room—in particular, an ABC-TV black and white video-relay camera—captured pictures of Pruszynski, his recorder and microphone in hand, as he descended the ballroom platform's east steps, departed the steps and proceeded toward the kitchen pantry precisely while the shooting was taking place off-camera, inside the pantry. As the Kennedy shooting continued in the pantry, Pruszynski continued moving in the ballroom toward the corridor that accessed the pantry, getting his microphone closer to the shooting but still unaware of the shots erupting in that other room.

Pruszynski's audio recording captured several rapidly occurring sounds, each one very short in duration and with something of a popping or even clapping quality. "Conspiracy Test" quoted four audio experts who analyzed the Pruszynski recording: two experts in the United States, a third in Denmark and a fourth in the United Kingdom. Three of them determined that the tape had captured at least 10 gunshots—and possibly as many as 13 shots—in the RFK assassination; all other possible sources for the sounds, including popping balloons, ricochets, echoes, etc., were ruled out. The presence of at least 10 shots is highly significant because Sirhan's handgun could fire no more than eight shots at a single time and because Sirhan possessed only the one revolver and had no opportunity to reload his weapon once the shooting erupted in the pantry. Confirmation of more than eight shots being fired in the RFK assassination would be strong evidence of a second gun being fired by someone other than Sirhan.

The fourth audio expert dissented on the issue of number of shots, reporting that he was only able to confirm seven or eight shots in the Pruszynski recording. However, the Discovery Times program made it clear that the fourth expert had not been provided all of the information and materials that had been made available to the other three experts. While all four experts bypassed a crude cassette copy of the Pruszynski recording that had been created years before by the California State Archives in Sacramento, only the first three experts worked directly from several high-quality digital and analog master dubs of the recording; the fourth expert had to rely on a copy of just one of those master dubs. Unlike the first three experts, the fourth expert also did not know where Pruszynski and his microphone were located during the Kennedy shooting and was unaware that Pruszynski and his microphone were moving toward the shots as they were being fired. In the TV program, the fourth expert conceded, "Any information relating to where Mr. Pruszynski was standing at the time or any movements he made during the sequence of shots would, to some degree, have been of assistance."

The Pruszynski recording's importance rests not only upon the number of shots fired but also upon two additional issues: the intervals between the shots and differing acoustic characteristics. Accordingly, two of the four audio experts reported that the Pruszynski recording contains evidence of a second gunman firing virtually simultaneously with Sirhan. They determined—and a firearms expert concurred—that there was at least one set of so-called "double-shots," and possibly two sets. In the one set of "double-shots" that these experts confirmed for "Conspiracy Test", the set's twin shots were fired too close together for both to have come from Sirhan's revolver. The shooting's two separate sets of "double-shots"—that is, the third and fourth shots in the first set and the seventh and eighth shots in the second set—were separated by 122 and 149 milliseconds respectively. In field tests, a trained firearms expert firing under ideal conditions could only manage 366 milliseconds between shots using the same weapon. The dissenting fourth audio expert did not address this key issue of shot intervals. In addition to the "double-shot" findings, one of the Discovery Times audio experts reported to the AAFS in 2008 that five of the shots heard in the recording—3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 in a sequence of 13 shots—had odd acoustic characteristics which the expert attributed to their being fired from a second gun pointing away from Pruszynski's microphone. In his scientific paper on the Pruszynski recording, the audio expert reported to the AAFS that a forensic investigation had matched the anomalous acoustic characteristics to those of a Harrington & Richardson .922 firearm. Sirhan's weapon in the pantry was a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet.

The significance of the Pruszynski recording was unknown for 36 years until early 2004, when an American journalist obtained a copy of the California State Archives's crude cassette dub of the original recording. The original is the only audio recording known to have captured the actual Robert Kennedy shooting. Two other sound recordings made that night by newsmen Andrew West of Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate KRKD and Jeff Brent of the Continental News Service recorded only the shooting's immediate aftermath.

Discovery Times's "Conspiracy Test" concluded by posing this question: "Will the continuing respect for Robert Kennedy and the new evidence of a second gunman lead to a re-opening of the RFK assassination?" One of the program's audio experts answered it this way: "My feeling about the evidence that's come up here is that you can't back away from real stuff. It merits closer examination. And as a citizen of this country (I believe) it has to be looked at."

Other victims

Initially, there were conflicting reports about the number of bystanders shot. Eventually it was confirmed that five people other than Kennedy were wounded: William Weisel of ABC News, Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers union, Democratic Party activist Elizabeth Evans, Ira Goldstein of the Continental News Service and Kennedy campaign volunteer Irwin Stroll.

At least two other people were accidentally injured by being struck in the face by camera equipment. Although not physically wounded, singer Rosemary Clooney, a great supporter of Kennedy, was present in the ballroom during the shooting in the pantry and suffered a nervous breakdown shortly afterward; two of Clooney's children also witnessed the shooting aftermath in the ballroom, including Hollywood actor Miguel Ferrer, who was 13 at the time.

Over the next 25 1/2 hours, television and radio broadcast live coverage, as Kennedy aide Frank Mankiewicz provided several updates at Good Samaritan Hospital on the dying Senator's condition. TV and radio aired live Mankiewicz's announcement, at 1:59 a.m. PDT on June 6, that Kennedy had passed away 15 minutes earlier, at 1:44 a.m. PDT.

Disputes and contentions

There seems to be no dispute that Sirhan fired his revolver. What is disputed is whether Sirhan planned and acted alone, whether there was another gunman at the scene, and whether Sirhan fired bullets or blanks. As with Robert's brother John's assassination in 1963, the Senator's death has been analyzed by many who have developed various alternative scenarios for the crime, or who argue there are serious problems with the official case. One theory is that the same people who orchestrated John F. Kennedy's assassination were behind his younger brother's murder 4 1/2 years later.

Autopsy

Sirhan's gun was placed by all witnesses at between 2 and 5 feet from the Senator when he fired his revolver. Despite the autopsy report suggesting that all four shots that hit Kennedy came from behind, all witnesses seemed to agree Sirhan was facing Kennedy when he fired. In conducting the autopsy on Kennedy, Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on Kennedy's ear and gunpowder residue in his hair. Noguchi said this indicated that Kennedy was shot from a distance of, at most, Template:In to cm. (When a firearm is discharged, the powder residue travels only a few inches because the material is very light.) Noguchi's conclusions led to speculation that Sirhan was too far from Kennedy and in the wrong position to have administered the fatal shot (also fired from a .22 caliber handgun, one which had apparently been fired into Kennedy's head at point-blank range from behind his right ear) and that a second shooter must have been present. Dr. Noguchi wrote years later that:

Until more is precisely known…the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus, I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.

— Dr. Noguchi

Independent testing (shown in a 2004 "Unsolved History" series program on the Discovery Channel) indicates that gunpowder residue can easily travel over Template:In to cm, but that the stippling effect observed requires that the gun must have been less than Template:In to cm away.

Suppression or coverup

James Scott Enyart has claimed he was actively photographing the inside of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry at the moment of the shooting. Furthermore he contends that his three, 36-exposure rolls were confiscated by the LAPD and sealed by court-order for 20 years, and never returned in full which resulted in a lengthy court battle, from 1989 to 1996. The most important piece of photographic evidence, allegedly featuring the scenes of the Senator falling and bullet holes in the door frame and ceiling, were confined in 10 pictures found to be missing from the third negative. The Enyart trial was, from the start, surrounded by a series of blunders, including tampering with evidence in the archives, in addition to the disappearance of a large amount of related court files, and ultimately the missing negative and stolen first-generation prints. Enyart eventually won the trial against the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD and was consequently granted a financial settlement of $450,000. Among Enyart's principal witnesses were Sirhan’s official researchers such as Lynn Mangan and Ted Charach.

Sandy Serrano, a young Kennedy campaign worker, said that during questioning, she was intimidated by police and forced to change her story. The official LAPD transcript of her polygraph interview seems to show that she was pressured to change her statement.

Conspiracy theories

Kennedy campaign worker Sandy Serrano claimed a young Hispanic man and a young Caucasian woman wearing a "polka dot" dress burst from a southwest exit of the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room ballroom moments after the shooting, giggling and exclaiming, "We shot him." When she asked them "Who?" the young woman answered, "Senator Kennedy!" The two then walked into a hotel parking lot where an elderly couple named Bernstein saw them, still laughing and saying, "We shot Kennedy." The Bernsteins flagged down LAPD officer Paul Sharaga, who issued an all points bulletin for the young couple but this was canceled without explanation by his superiors. Serrano said she was later coerced by police into changing her story.

CIA operatives

On November 20, 2006, the BBC's Newsnight presented research by Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several CIA agents were present on the night of the assassination. On November 20, 2007, O'Sullivan released a video documentary entitled RFK Must Die, providing an update on his investigation and findings.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction, and some of the officers were based in Southeast Asia at the time, with no apparent reason to be in Los Angeles. Three of those accused were former senior officers who had worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's main anti-Castro station based in Miami.

JMWAVE Chief of Operations David Morales, Chief of Maritime Operations Gordon Campbell and Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations George Joannides were identified by former acquaintances in photographs taken at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968. Among those acquaintances was Congressional investigator Ed Lopez, who worked with Joannides while the latter was serving as CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

According to O'Sullivan, Morales was known for his deep anger with the Kennedys for what he saw as their betrayal during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. O'Sullivan quoted Morales as having said, "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." O'Sullivan reported that the CIA denied that the officers in question were present and declined to comment further.

O’Sullivan interviewed David Rabern, a freelance mercenary and private investigator who had been contracted by the CIA to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Rabern had been in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on the fateful night in 1968. While Rabern did not know Morales and Campbell by name, he had noticed them talking to each other in the hotel lobby prior to the assassination. He also noticed Campbell in and around several police stations on U.S. soil over which the CIA had no jurisdiction.

See also: § Autopsy

At the end of his documentary, however, Mr. O'Sullivan not only casts doubt upon his own presentation up to that point, but practically debunks the entire premise advanced that there were three identified CIA operatives in the ballroom with no business being there. O'Sullivan reveals that the two men who were previously identified in the documentary as "Campbell" and "Joannides" were in fact two now-deceased Bulova Watch Company employees, at the Ambassador for a company convention. They are further revealed in other footage of the ballroom on the night of the assassination, in various innocent situations, laughing, talking with others, etc., prior to the shooting of Senator Kennedy. After the shooting, they are shown in television news footage, listening to witnesses, unabashedly wandering before presumably openly visible television cameras, generally looking quite casual and not in any hurry to depart the area. Footage of "Campbell" in particular had been shown several times earlier in the documentary in seemingly suspicious movements, appearing hurriedly to depart the ballroom after the shooting, touching his chest furtively as if concealing a gun, etc.; the later footage in the documentary debunks this entire earlier premise by showing his casual, unhurried movements immediately before and thereafter. He remained in the ballroom at the time of the shooting.

Moreover, the impressively positive identifications by CIA operatives and acquaintances over time of "Morales" as being a man in the ballroom footage, (and equally at home casually appearing several times in front of obviously placed television cameras after the shooting, including once during an interview of a witness in the kitchen pantry where the shooting took place), were called into question also by O'Sullivan's revelation of clearer photographs than the grainy, early-sixties photo used through most of the documentary for viewer comparison to the man in the film footage. The latter photograph indeed greatly resembled the man in the Ambassador ballroom footage; but the clearer photos, taken in 1967 and 1969, showed a man who does not nearly so greatly resemble the man in the Ambassador footage of June 5, 1968.

O'Sullivan himself expresses doubt in the end that "Morales" in the film footage at the Ambassador and the man positively identified as Morales in the 1967 and 1969 clear photos are the same man.

O'Sullivan also indicates, without any substantiation, that the Bulova Watch Company was a "well-known cover" for the CIA, according to "several people" to whom O'Sullivan talked off-camera, and attempts by implication to confirm that link by the fact that World War II General Omar Bradley was the chairman of Bulova at the time and also advised President Johnson on Vietnam; nowhere, however, is Bradley linked with the CIA. Bulova did make bomb fuses for the government during the Cold War, but there is no documented historical link with the CIA.

O'Sullivan concludes by asking rhetorically whether the two employees, named by their Bulova employee names in the documentary, based on their being labeled on the back of L.A.P.D. evidence photos demonstrating they had been investigated and interviewed briefly by the police at the time of the assassination, could have been using other names, "Campbell" and "Joannides", in their supposed CIA roles, with the Bulova jobs as cover. The documentary also reveals, however, that the man identified as "Campbell", under his real name, advanced to become a "well-respected" and well-known man in Bulova and the watch industry generally by the late 1970's.

In the end, O'Sullivan's documentary tends to debunk itself. Whether Sirhan, however, was "handled", brainwashed, manipulated or hypnotized as a "Manchurian candidate", is extensively explored by the documentary, but in the end is loaned no more than speculation by the effort. The analysis, however, is at once intriguing and even plausible.

Robert Kennedy, ironically, had spent the previous night before the shooting at the home of supporter and friend, director John Frankenheimer, director of both "Seven Days in May" and "The Manchurian Candidate".

Sirhan's motivations

According to author Loren Coleman, the date of the assassination is significant, because it was the first anniversary of the first day of the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors that began on June 5, 1967. Sirhan Sirhan's shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, Coleman writes, has been characterized as one of the first acts of Palestine or Arab terrorism to take place on American soil. Coleman suggests Sirhan saw himself as a Palestinian militant.

In a diary police found at Sirhan's home, Sirhan had written, "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more and more of an unshakable obsession. RFK must die. RFK must be killed. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated. .... Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 1968."

Legacy

The assassination of Robert Kennedy is part of a series of events in the 1960s that led to the demoralizing and alienation of many people in the political centre-left in the United States. These events began with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and included the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, culminating in the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where police brutally assaulted anti-Vietnam war demonstrators. It is unclear whether Robert Kennedy, had he not been assassinated, would have gone on to become the Democratic presidential nominee. At the time of his death, Kennedy was far behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey in convention delegate support, which Humphrey had gathered through commitments from party bosses outside the presidential primary system. This fact, however, has not deterred many from the belief that Kennedy had indeed wrapped up the nomination by his victory in the California primary. Following Kennedy's June 1968 assassination in Los Angeles, Humphrey continued gathering delegate commitments from the party bosses and was nominated in Chicago. Humphrey went on to lose a very close 1968 presidential election to Republican Richard Nixon.

See also

• Kennedy Curse
• Kennedy family
• Bobby (2006 film)
• List of assassinated American politicians
• 1968

External links

• The Coalition on Political Assassinations, A research and lobby group that also organize a conference on the assassination of Senator Kennedy.
• (AUDIO) Black Op Radio interview concerning the Pruszynski recording on August 9, 2007
• Los Angeles Police Dept. Records — From the Online Archive of California
• Sirhan and the RFK Assassination — Part 1: The Grand Illusion by Lisa Pease
• Sirhan and the RFK Assassination - Part 2: Rubik's Cube by Lisa Pease
• Articles about the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy — From Citizens for the Truth about the Kennedy Assassination
• Bobby, I didn't know! — From Mike Ruppert
• FBI report summary — Released under the Freedom of Information Act
• Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Collections — Articles disputing that Sirhan killed Kennedy
• FrontPage magazine.com :: The 'Unaffiliated' Terrorist by Mel Ayton
• FrontPage magazine.com :: Did the PLO Kill RFK? by Mel Ayton
• Interview with Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter with lot of details on obstruction of justice - KPFA 94.1 / Guns & Butter show
• Blackop Radio, interview with the major RFK expert the late P.H. Melanson, Ph.D., Chancellor Professor of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (most recently in show #290b)
• The RFK Assassination — The Acoustics Evidence by Steve Barber
• The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress by Mel Ayton
• Did The CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy — The BBC's Blunder by Mel Ayton
• How The Discovery Channel Duped The American Public About the RFK Assassination Acoustics Debate
• Robert Kennedy Assassination: Revisions and Rewrites by Joseph Geringer
• The RFK Assassination Project
• KCAL TV coverage of Pruszynski recording findings on February 21, 2008
• NBC30 TV coverage of Pruszynski recording findings on March 26, 2008
• More WVIT-NBC30 TV coverage of Pruszynski recording findings on March 26, 2008
• Initial MSNBC TV coverage of Pruszynski recording findings on March 26, 2008
• ABC TV Good Morning America coverage of Pruszynski recording findings on March 27, 2008
• New Evidence challenges official picture of Kennedy shooting, The Guardian on February 22, 2008
• RFK killer may be living abroad, say authors, New Haven Register on March 26, 2008
• New evidence suggests second shooter killed RFK, The Raw Story on March 26, 2008
• Conspiracy-Theory Circle of Life: Diana and Bobby, New York Times on March 31, 2008
• An Open & Shut Case - Details on the newly-discovered Pruszynski recording

34.0597°N 118.2971°W / 34.0597; -118.2971