Category: Robert Francis Kennedy

The Second Dallas is a DVD documentary produced, written and directed by Massimo Mazzucco. It begins with Robert Kennedy on the campaign trail in Indianapolis making the famous announcement that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. It then proceeds to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Senator Kennedy made his final victory speech after winning the California primary in the early hours of June 5, 1968. He proceeded from the ballroom and into the kitchen pantry. There, the shooting began. Senator Kennedy was shot and five others were wounded. RFK was taken to two hospitals. At Good Samaritan Hospital, after unsuccessful brain surgery, spokesman Frank Mankiewicz announced Kennedy dead on June 6th. Since Sirhan had stepped forward and been firing at RFK, he was immediately apprehended and taken into custody.

From the beginning, as the film states, Sirhan could not recall anything about the actual shooting sequence. His last memory was having coffee at a table with a girl, the famous “Girl in the Polka Dot Dress”. One of the interviewees, the late Philip Melanson, comes on to say that this seeming mental block appears to be genuine. At least, both the defense and the prosecution psychiatrists deemed it so. At his home the police found notebooks which say things like ‘RFK Must Die” in them. Sirhan also stated that although these appear to be in his handwriting, he did not recall writing them. He also added that they did not reflect his real personality. And in fact, Sirhan had no previous past record of violence. And his friends and neighbors concurred that he seemed to be a quiet, almost introverted young man.

At Sirhan’s trial, his defense team—headed by Grant Cooper—did not challenge any of the forensic evidence: the recovered bullets, the shooting scenario, the gun used, the eyewitness testimony etc. Cooper accepted it all at face value. Instead, he tried to use a psychiatric defense. This did not work. Sirhan was sentenced to death in the gas chamber. The California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty afterwards, so Sirhan’s sentence was then commuted to life in prison. Which is where he is today.

But as the film notes, after the trial, many independent researchers began to uncover problems with the Los Angeles Police Department’s case against Sirhan. The film now goes into a series of segments, which depict these areas of conflict. The first area discussed is the number of bullets that were fired that night. One must consider the fact that Sirhan’s handgun carried, at a maximum, eight bullets. Yet, in addition to the bullets in the victims, there was also reliable testimony and evidence that bullets were extracted from a doorjamb and in the walls. Further, the LAPD expert, DeWayne Wolfer, had to make three of the bullets he charted do rather wild things in the air to make sure they accounted for all the shots into both RFK, and th remaining victims. Since four shots hit RFK, and there were five other victims hit, one can see, that those eight bullets had to do some real work. The film deduces that from this evidence alone, there were at least 11 shots fired.

The next area shown supports this additional strong evidence: the Stanislav Pruszyynski audiotape. Pruszynski was a young reporter on leave to write a book about the 1968 race for the presidency. He had an audio tape recorder with him as he followed RFK leaving the podium. Sound technician Philip Van Praag analyzed this audiotape for bullet sounds. He came to the conclusion there were 13 such shots on the tape. He also concluded there were a couple of instances where the shots were spaced too closely for one person to be firing them (for a more full discussion of this issue, click here). This piece of evidence is a key element in the current appeal motion by Willliam Pepper and Laurie Dusek, Sirhan’ s new lawyers (click here for that story).

The third aspect of the case the film explores is the famous “Girl in the Polka Dot Dress”. This was a young girl seen that night with Sirhan by several witnesses like reporter Booker Griffin and realtor George Green. After the shooting, the girl fled down the rear stairs and was seen by Sandra Serrano. As she ran down the stairs she shouted, “We shot him, we shot him!” Serrano asked, “Who did you shoot?” She said, “Senator Kennedy.” Officer Paul Sharaga heard the same. But in his report, the words “We shot him” were changed to “They shot him.”

The fourth aspect of the crime presented is the strange case of Scott Enyart. Enyart was a high school press photographer who was in the pantry during the shooting. He says he took photos before and during and after the actual shooting. He was arrested afterwards and his photos were confiscated. Later on some of his photos were returned. But none of these were the ones taken during the firing sequence. When he asked for the rest of the photos, the police said they were classified. So Enyart waited for 20 years. He then asked the California Archives for the rest of his pictures. They said that these had been destroyed three weeks before the Sirhan trial.

The fifth area the film visits is the topic of the destruction of evidence. Here the film centers on the disappeared ceiling panels and doorjambs, which reportedly contained evidence of bullet holes. Police Chief Daryl Gates says that since the case went to court and the man was convicted, well then, “You can’t keep junk around forever.” Gates ignores the fact that Sirhan’s appeals process was ongoing at the time these items were destroyed. He later adds, also on camera, that these items did not have evidentiary value. To which one can reply, “We are glad you are not a judge. So stop acting like one.” The film also adds in the point that DeWayne Wolfer test fired several bullets from what he said was the revolver in evidence in the case, namely Sirhan’s. But yet the folder in which he kept those test bullets did not bear the serial number of that revolver, which was H53725. It actually bore the serial number of H18602. Which actually belonged to a petty criminal named Jake Williams. And it was the same Iver Johnson Cadet model as the one in evidence. Amazingly, this folder was actually submitted at Sirhan’s trial and never challenged by defense lawyer Grant Cooper. Wolfer later tried to excuse this as a “clerical error”.

The sixth area explored is the autopsy of RFK performed by Dr. Thomas Noguchi. The narrator now intones some familiar facts: Noguchi found that all the bullets that hit Kennedy came from behind; they came in at an upward angle, and they were fired from close range. The fatal shot entered behind the right ear had to have been between 1-3 inches away, or a point blank shot. No witness placed Sirhan either behind Kennedy or that close to the senator. Further, as Philip Melanson notes, no witness recalled a gun placed behind Kennedy’s head. Which would have been an unforgettable image. This evidence, in and of itself, eliminates Sirhan as the man who killed RFK.

The seventh point of controversy examined is related to the above, it is the testimony of hotel maitre d’ Karl Uecker. Uecker was the man escorting Kennedy through the hotel pantry. When Sirhan jumped forward and began firing, Uecker jumped on him and pinned his gun hand down to a steam table. Uecker is a central witness for more than one reason. First, as he says here, he was always between Sirhan and Kennedy. Therefore, Sirhan could not have shot Kennedy from behind. Second, he leaped upon Sirhan right after the first shot. He had him in a headlock with one arm and his other hand was on the handgun. At the most Sirhan could have delivered two accurate shots. Every other shot was fired blindly, with his hand pinned and body down. As Uecker says, “He didn’t see anything…I had him completely covered.”

The last point evidentiary point is a discussion of Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar, of course, is the hired security guard who was stationed at the door leading into the kitchen. Unlike Sirhan, Cesar was behind RFK, and therefore was in perfect position to deliver the shots into Senator Kennedy. And although Cesar denies firing his handgun that night, there is a witness who says he did so fire. That is a man named Don Schulman, who worked for a TV station at the time. Schulman said the guard behind RFK fired three times. When he tried to offer this information to the authorities, his account was ignored. And although Cesar said he did not own a .22 handgun like the one in evidence at the time, it turned out that he actually had owned one at the time. The film concludes that Cesar is the most likely suspect as the actual assassin.

The film concludes with a discussion of the idea of hypnoprogramming. Melanson states that he believed that Sirhan was programmed to fire that night and then to not recall that he had. There are clips from the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. There are then interviews with Herb Spiegel, an expert on hypnosis and the late Larry Teeter, Sirhan’s former defense lawyer. They both discuss how easy a subject Sirhan was for hypnosis. There is then a concluding interview with Professor Alan Scheflin of Santa Clara University about the history of CIA mind control experiments with a programmed assassin.

Aesthetically and intellectually, I would put this film at about the level of Shane O’Sullivan’s, RFK Must Die. It does not approach the standard in this field, The Assassination of Robert Kennedy, 1992, done for British television. Unlike that film, this one is put together in a rather rudimentary way. Although there are some graphic simulations in the film, little else that has developed in the way of computer software in the last few years seems to have had an effect on this production. There is nothing very slick or imaginative about the way director Massimo Mazzucco has done his job. As noted above, the film makes a rather familiar series of points about the RFK case. But further, these points are only sketched out; none of them are gone into in any depth. Therefore, no one familiar with this case could come away from this film in any way enlightened by it. The film is then limited in its intellectual value to the entering student of the case. It is also marred by some rather amateurish errors that should have been picked up by anyone viewing the film in a rough cut. If you can believe it, in a title card near the beginning, Sirhan’s name is misspelled as “Shiran”. Later on, Thane Eugene Cesar is named Eugene Thane Cesar. A clip labeled from the original version of The Manchurian Candidate, is not. It appears to be from a Sherlock Holmes film. DeWayne Wolfer’s first name is spelled “Dwayne”. And although the film says that Sirhan was not called to testify at his trial, he actually did testify.

Mazzucco at least tried to make a documentary on the RFK case to bring to the public some troubling facts. But today, that really is not good enough. We need films that are much more slickly and technically proficient than either this one or RFK Must Die. And we need them to be error free, or as close to that as possible. The facts of this case are so compelling that they cry out for that kind of presentation.

RFK Must Die is Shane O’Sullivan’s new documentary on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The film, just released on DVD, takes its title from Robert Blair Kaiser’s 1970 book on the case. In almost every major aspect it is a one-man show: O’Sullivan wrote, produced, and directed it. He also narrates it, which is the first of some poor choices, since his voice carries a high-pitched Irish lilt.

The film is divided into four sections: The Last Campaign, The Investigation, The Manchurian Candidate, and Did the CIA Kill RFK? Before getting to its negatives, let me list what I see as the film’s attributes. Some of the interview subjects, to my knowledge, appear for the first time. Sandra Serrano, the first witness to publicly discuss the famous Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, makes her first appearance on camera in decades. Sirhan’s brother Munir and controversial defense investigator Michael McGowan also appear. And O’Sullivan has unearthed some interesting Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry photos, which appear to show that someone was digging bullets out of the walls. This would indicate that there were more than eight bullets-the limit of Sirhan’s revolver-fired the night of the assassination.

Vincent DiPierro, a part-time waiter at the Ambassador at the time of the assassination, is also interviewed. He reveals that there was a bullet hole in his sweater that night. Any one bullet found anywhere in the pantry would indicate more than eight bullets were fired, and in turn would mean a second gun was firing.

O’Sullivan has arranged for that illustrious expert on hypnosis, Herbert Spiegel, to appear on camera. And Spiegel shows us a taped example of him hypnotizing someone, planting a post hypnotic suggestion in that person, waking him from the trance state, and then not having him recall anything he did while under hypnosis. Which is very likely what happened to Sirhan.

But sad to say, for anyone familiar with the Robert Kennedy assassination, that is about it for the virtues of RFK Must Die. Aesthetically speaking, the film is very simple, straightforward, and, to be frank, kind of dull. I have much more sympathy for O’Sullivan’s views on the RFK case than I did for those of Robert Stone, director of the Warren Commission-apologist Oswald’s Ghost. But technique wise, Stone leaves O’Sullivan in the dust.

We live in an age where the documentary form has risen to a truly imaginative level of aesthetic approach. This is exemplified by works like Brett Morgan’s and Nan Burstein’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, and Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares. I would say that technically and aesthetically, O’Sullivan’s film is a notch or two above sixties pioneers like Emile de Antonio and the Maysles Brothers. This is saying something, of course, since computer graphics now can be done on line and then switched over to digital video, and at a reasonable price. It would seem to me that from my two viewings of the film, O’Sullivan availed himself of very little of these new technologies.

Even this would not be so bad if O’Sullivan had any kind of pictorial eye or sensitivity to things like sound and montage to give the film any kind of distinction of form. But if you take a look at the compositions in the interview shots with, say, Robert Blair Kaiser or Vincent DiPierro, you will see the work of a not very gifted amateur. And the use of sound in those shots is equally revealing. O’Sullivan includes himself, either off screen or back to camera in the on-screen dialogue, usually an unwise practice. But this is made even worse since those scenes were not properly wired for sound. So his voice comes in decibels lower and he is harder to hear than the subject.

I would have been willing to forgive most of the above if the content of the film had some real howitzers in it. For example, the Discovery Times special on the RFK case was not done at a much higher technical level than this was. But it had some pieces of information in it that were new, quite relevant, and which the film used with real force. That cannot be said about this current effort. What can one write about a full-length documentary on the RFK case which does not mention the name of infamous LAPD firearms expert, DeWayne Wolfer?

If that’s not enough for you, the film fails to mention William Harper. Without Harper there may never have been any critical movement in the RFK case. (For those not familiar with the RFK case, this would be like doing a documentary on the JFK case and leaving out both Mark Lane and Arlen Specter.) There is no mention or interview of Scott Enyart, either. Enyart was the high school photographer who was at the Ambassador Hotel the night of the assassination. He took photos in the pantry while RFK was being shot. Years later he asked to get his pictures back. He never did. In 1996 he ended up suing the LAPD. (See Probe Vol. 4 #1 and #2) He actually won the case in court. Some extraordinary things happened at the trial. New testimony emerged about how the LAPD actually destroyed Scott’s film. About how the LAPD had falsely numbered pieces of evidence in the Sirhan trial exhibit log to hide exculpatory evidence. That even as late as 1995, bullet evidence was being tampered with at the Sacramento Archives. (For actual photo documentation of this tampering see Probe Vol. 5 #3, p. 27.)

In 1998, Lisa Pease wrote a fine two-part essay on the case. (Probe Vol. 5 #3 and #4). This article is one of the three best long essays on the RFK case that I know. (The other two were by Ted Charach and the late Greg Stone.) In this work, Pease revealed even more mishandling of the evidence. Namely that bullet fragments left the property room of the LAPD and went to a special agent of the FBI for approximately eight days before being returned to Wolfer. And at the instance of their return, Wolfer had them cleaned and photographed for the first time. Why did they leave and what happened to them in FBI custody? Why were no shells from the gun in evidence recovered from the shooting range Sirhan was reported at on 6/4/68? Even though the LAPD recovered over 38, 000 shell casings from the range!

In her article, Pease incorporated some key findings from Sirhan’s former investigator Lynn Mangan, such as the photographic fakery of Special Exhibit 10. This photo allegedly reveals a comparison of an RFK bullet with a test bullet form Sirhan’s gun. In fact, the comparison is actually with a bullet from another victim, Ira Goldstein, not RFK. Which leaves the question: Could the LAPD not get a positive comparison with Sirhan’s gun and an RFK bullet? Her article also showed a fascinating connection between the mysterious Iranian intelligence agent Khaiber Khan and the man who was probably the third gun in the pantry that night, Michael Wayne.

Now all of the above is not meant to (solely) show how proficient Probe was in covering the RFK case. But it is to indicate just how much is lacking from this new documentary. And in addition to not interviewing Scott Enyart, there is no interview with Dr. Thomas Noguchi. In fact, I don’t even recall his photo being used. This is the man who, according to Allard Lowenstein, made the earth move under the RFK case when his autopsy results were finally made public.

What does O’Sullivan offer us instead? Well, he gives us living room reconstructions of the assassination with DiPierro and Kennedy aide Kenny Burns. Yet with only one camera on hand, and shot from ground level, I did not find these very illuminating. To illustrate the illogic of Wolfer’s eight bullet scenario in the pantry, O’Sullivan pans his camera over the LAPD schematic of the bullet trajectories. In 1993, when Tim Tate did his excellent documentary on the RFK case for British television, he used a very clear and dynamic computer graphic for this demonstration. When O’Sullivan plays the tape of the infamous Serrano/Hank Hernandez polygraph interview, he puts it against a rather static background of still photos of the pair. When Tate did this, he showed us a tape recorder only, against a black backdrop with the words flashing on the screen. And the sound was well modulated to catch the incredible harshness, almost brutality of the session. And the excerpts he picked were better chosen to illustrate that brutality.

O’Sullivan spends a lot of time on the Manchurian Candidate aspect of the case. Some of it is good, but I think he should have spent less time interviewing Spiegel, playing the Sirhan hypnosis tapes, and trying to simulate Sirhan’s walk from the coffee table to the pantry (which does not work very well anyway). What I think would have been better was to trace, with documents, how the CIA developed the program in the first place, how it was kept secret, who destroyed the documentary record, and how certain documents point to the exact circumstances which insinuate Sirhan in this crime. And the guy to interview for that would have been either Walter Bowart (Operation Mind Control) or John Marks (The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.)

And this would have been, I think, a better conclusion for the film than what O’Sullivan has decided to end it with. He largely repeats what he did for the BBC many months ago, namely, the alleged identification of three CIA officers at the Ambassador Hotel the night of the RFK murder: George Johannides, Gordon Campbell, and, of course Dave Morales. The accent on this Morales story first began in 1993 with Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation. There the clinching quote, through Morales’ attorney Robert Walton, was this: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” (p. 390)

Please note this quote does not necessarily imply that Morales was part of the plot to kill President Kennedy, or that he even had first hand knowledge of it. What it does imply is that Morales knew people who told him they were involved. But now, through David Talbot’s book Brothers and this documentary, the quote has been embellished and expanded in both specificity and quantity. In its current version Walton quotes Morales thusly: “I was in Dallas when we got that mother fucker, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.” [Emphasis added.] Hmm. From Fonzi’s version in 1993 and hearing about one assassination, now Morales is actually in on both of them. With the way things grow in the JFK case — which is where Morales originated — what will be next? How about: “I was in Memphis when we got that Black Messiah King!”

In addition to the enlargement of the quote, the photo identifications themselves are also weakened. Talbot discovered two photos of Morales, one from 1967, and one from 1969. They do not closely resemble the man alleged to be Morales in the films from the Ambassador. As for the ID’s of Campbell and Johannides, O’Sullivan reveals that the LAPD identified the two men as, respectively, Michael Roman and Frank Owens. They were both executives for Bulova watch company. Although both are dead today, Roman’s family concurred with the identification, and knew who Owens was. O’Sullivan tries to salvage something from this by saying that Bulova was a recipient of a large amount of Pentagon funding during the sixties. And further that its chairman, Omar Bradley, was a special adviser to Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam War. He even reaches for the theory that Roman and Campbell may have somehow switched identities. As a fallback, salvage type operation I found this all pretty lame and unsubstantiated.

So overall, the film is a sad and puzzling disappointment. It could and should have been much better. Considering the state of knowledge in the case, and the state of computer technology, it should have been compelling in form and convincing in content. Unfortunately, it is neither.