Kennedys and King Test host626

Category: Robert Francis Kennedy

Original essays treating the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, its historical and political context and aftermath, and the investigations conducted.

  • Review of RFK Legacy film

    Review of RFK Legacy film

    Sean Stone and Rob Wilson: RFK Legacy

    Rob Wilson produced JFK Revisited for director Oliver Stone. He has now produced RFK Legacy for director Sean Stone, Oliver’s son. This new documentary seems to me to be unique in its field. Because it deals with three Kennedys: John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Robert Kennedy Jr. And the concentration is on Senator Robert Kennedy: his life, and also his assassination.

    It begins with Robert Kennedy announcing that he is running for president in 1968. It then briefly deals with three primaries in that race: Indiana, Oregon–the first election a Kennedy lost– and the triumph in California on June 4th over Senatorial rival Eugene McCarthy. We see RFK at the podium reciting his now iconic (and final) public phrase, “On to Chicago and let’s win there.” The film then cuts to the aftermath of that victory: the utter shock, disbelief and hysteria of the crowd as some of them see, and the rest of them learn, that RFK has been assassinated. Recall, this is just two months after the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis. And it is the second Kennedy to be assassinated in five years. The grief at what had just happened at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was almost palpable. The Jungian consciousness behind it all was this: it was the premature burial of the sixties.

    The film follows as RFK’s body was transported from California to a requiem at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, as that was the state from which he was senator. To make the passing of the era even more symbolic, on that plane were not just Ethel Kennedy, but both Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King. Bobby Kennedy had paid a large part of the cost for King’s funeral in April. And the night of King’s murder, he gave what was probably his finest speech—one which prevented Indianapolis from going up in flames, as almost every other major city in America had. Jackie Kennedy strongly objected to RFK running for president. She feared that what had happened to her husband would happen to him. He had become the substitute father to her children.

    What then followed the service was the train ride from New York City to the burial at Arlington Cemetery in Washington, DC. Arthur Schlesinger was on that train. He had originally thought Bobby was a lesser candidate than Jack. He had since changed his mind. At the end, he thought RFK would make an even greater president than his brother. One reason was that he had become more radical than Jack. He wrote in his diary, “We have now murdered the three men who, more than any other, incarnated the idealism of America in our time.” He pledged never to get this close to any other such candidate. It was too tragic. (David Margolick, The Promise and the Dream, pp. 385-86)

    The film flashes back to RFK’s career with commentators like Lisa Pease in the present and Ed Murrow from the past. We see a young Robert Kennedy as lead counsel for the McClellan Committee going up against the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and, later, Sam Giancana. Members of the press now pronounced Kennedy “ruthless’ for exposing the Cosa Nostra so relentlessly. Which is something that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were reluctant to do.

    When his brother won the presidency, RFK continued his crusade against organized crime as Attorney General. He also, like no other previous AG, pursued the breaking down of segregation in the South and civil rights for African Americans. Further, as the film shows, it was RFK who exposed to JFK that the CIA had deceived him about the Bay of Pigs operation. They knew it could not succeed without Pentagon support. In fact, they knew it would fail. But they thought JFK would commit American power to salvage it. He did not. Therefore, JFK fired Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Dick Bissell.

    This split with the Agency was made worse by the fact that the CIA had secretly contracted out with three members of the Cosa Nostra—John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante—to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is after RFK had ordered a full court press on organized crime, and ordered an almost total surveillance over Giancana. When the FBI (accidentally) discovered these plots and informed Bobby about them, he asked for a briefing by the CIA. The Agency told him the plots had stopped. They had not. And the Agency knew they had not when they lied to him about it.

    By midway through 1961, Bobby became an advisor to JFK on foreign policy. During the Missile Crisis, there was no one more trusted by the president than Bobby. When there was true fear of having to resort to the Greenbrier Underground Shelter –which the film depicts—President Kennedy opted for the blockade alternative. For which he was harshly criticized, especially by the Joint Chiefs. When the Russians communicated a truce agreement, it was RFK who advised his brother on the terms to accept.

    As the film notes, after the double assassinations of JFK and then Oswald, Bobby Kennedy began a metamorphosis. He now became a gentler, kinder, more sensitive politician and person. This was typified by his visits to Mississippi at the request of Marian Edelman, and to California for Cesar Chavez. (I was personally told by the late Paul Schrade that it was Cesar’s idea to approach RFK on this.)

    In keeping with the title of the film, we now shift to RFK Jr. He consciously followed his father’s footsteps by first attending Harvard and then the University of Virginia School of Law. He developed a chronic drug problem after his father’s death, which included running away from home. He was eventually arrested for heroin possession in South Dakota. As part of his probation, he worked for the conservation group the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It was that experience which transformed him into an environmental lawyer of the first rank.

    Some of his successful crusades were his legal actions over pollution of the Hudson River, during which he joined the Riverkeepers group, which had started with fisherman John Cronin. It was this longstanding Hudson River campaign which many feel was the real beginning of the environmental movement in the USA. Kennedy also took on Monsanto and General Electric. He became well known in New York and was featured on the cover of several popular magazines for saving the Hudson River from becoming a cesspool. New York magazine captioned him as “The Kennedy Who Matters”. He wrote a book called Crimes Against Nature, railing against George W. Bush’s environmental policies. This and his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 got him interviews with Jon Stewart and then Stephen Colbert. He was so in demand that he was doing almost 200 speeches per year.

    The film deals with what eventually caused the MSM to turn on Kennedy. It began with his campaign against mercury in pollution and the fact that it was in some vaccines wrapped in a preservative called thimerosal. He was not the only person to warn about this. Congressman Frank Pallone had done so in 1997. The film also features people like psychologist Sarah Bridges, actress Grace Hightower and essayist Lyn Redwood on the issue. I am not qualified to render any kind of definitive judgment on the subject, so I will not.

    The film then deals with the other issue that turned the MSM against Robert Kennedy Jr. That would be his view of the assassinations of his uncle and then his father. As the film shows, RFK Jr. was first suspicious about his uncle’s death. This was based on the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. He could not understand why Ruby did what he did in public and in front of TV cameras. He later found out that Ruby was much more than just a patriotic strip club owner. At this point in the film, Sean Stone brings in David Talbot, who does a very nice job describing what happened when RFK heard the news from J. Edgar Hoover that his brother was dead. He immediately suspected a conspiracy, as Talbot described in the early part of his book, Brothers.

    RFK could not stay for the rest of the LBJ term. So after he, Thomas Kuchel and Hubert Humphrey got his brother’s civil rights bill through the Senate, he departed. (As Clay Risen shows in his book The Bill of the Century, what LBJ did on this bill has been greatly exaggerated.) As senator from New York, Kennedy became what author Edward Schmitt called the President of the Other America. He was there for the poor, the young, and the downtrodden.

    He was obviously the candidate to run against Johnson in 1968. After all, as he himself told Daniel Ellsberg, his brother’s policy would not have allowed Vietnam to escalate as under Johnson. (Ellsberg at Harvard JFK seminar in 1993). As Talbot states, by 1968, RFK was going to run on civil rights, poverty and withdrawing from Vietnam. Contrary to popular belief, and as revealed by author Jules Witcover in his book 85 Days, Kennedy had decided before the New Hampshire primary that he would run. McCarthy’s strong showing in that primary, plus the devastating Tet Offensive, forced Johnson out. As Witcover notes, Johnson would have lost in Wisconsin. And he knew that.

    The film closes with two powerful strophes. First is President Kennedy’s advocacy for Rachel Carson. Specifically in her battle against DDT and other pesticides in her 1962 classic Silent Spring. Carson had attended the May 1962 White House conference on conservation. And she testified before JFK’s Science Advisory Committee. She was battling breast cancer at the time, and she passed on in April of 1964. She was viciously attacked by the chemical companies, but she stood her ground.

    The second strophe is the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy Jr admits that he had accepted the orthodoxy on this case until he talked to Paul Schrade. Schrade was one of the victims of the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel that night. When the trajectory of the bullet that hit him was explained, he knew that the LAPD was passing horse manure. He eventually convinced Bobby to read Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report. That did it for RFK Jr. Thankfully, Sean Stone features Lisa Pease in this last segment. There is no better authority on the RFK murder than Lisa. And her book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, is mandatory reading for anyone interested in that case. Stone’s closing twenty minutes or so is quite pointed intellectually and well done artistically. Kudos should also go to Oliver Stone, who did the face-to-face interview with RFK Jr., editor Kurt Mattila, composer Jeff Beal and cinematographer Egor Povolotsky.

    I would recommend viewing the film to our readers. It is being streamed at Angel.com (https://www.angel.com/blog/rfk-legacy/posts/where-to-watch-rfk-legacy).

  • New Revelations from the Recently Released RFK files – Part 1

    New Revelations from the Recently Released RFK files – Part 1

    New Revelations from the Recently Released RFK files – Part 1

    By Lisa Pease, author of A Lie Too Big to Fail

    Having extensively researched CIA and FBI files on both the JFK and RFK assassinations for more than 30 years, I’m uniquely positioned to identify what’s new and important in the recently released RFK files. So far, I have found three big stories in the recently released records. I’ll start with the first story and continue in subsequent articles to illuminate the other two important stories I’ve found. There are also several smaller stories, which I will get to eventually.

    Just before the RFK files were released, a reporter from CBS News contacted several people who have written books about the RFK assassination to ask what they expected to find in the files. I told the reporter I was especially eager to see the CIA files, as I knew they had been involved in the LAPD’s investigation but had only seen portions of the LAPD’s communications, never the responses.[1]

    It’s a fact that the CIA was involved in the LAPD’s assassination investigation. But there could be innocent or sinister theories for why that would be. If the LAPD had invited the CIA into the case, that could indicate the CIA was not involved and was only summoned due to their ability to track down information about the numerous foreigners who became, however temporarily, part of the LAPD’s investigation. However, it could also have been possible that the LAPD invited the CIA into the investigation because they had planned it together. If, on the other hand, the CIA had invited themselves into the investigation, that would reveal a vested interest in the outcome of the investigation and would also appear to exonerate the LAPD in the planning of the assassination.

    So the first thing I wanted to know from the files was simply that: did the LAPD invite the CIA in? Or did the CIA invite themselves in?

    The first semi-answer came from an important CIA file released back in 2021, that I did not see until this year, after my book came out and after the updated paperback version had gone to print, that contained two documents.

    The first page of the 2021-released document was the CIA’s response to Dan Rather’s questions about whether Manny Pena and Enrique “Hank” Hernandez, the two LAPD officers in charge of the conspiracy side of the investigations of “Special Unit Senator,” the Los Angeles Police Department unit formed to investigate RFK’s assassination, had worked for the CIA. The CIA denied any connection, despite the fact that both of them had been credibly linked to the CIA.[2]

    I had seen the first document in the files years earlier and had to laugh upon seeing it again because the CIA has been known, frequently, to lie on the record when people got too close to their ties to the assassinations of the 1960s. In fact, several years back, I saw a comment in a forum where a poster said to his knowledge, the CIA had never lied to the Warren Commission. I was able to find a lie the CIA made to the Warren Commission in five minutes. Helms denied to the Warren Commission that the CIA had ever had any interest in Oswald, a lie that is now completely exposed with previous and current file releases.

    In the recently released RFK files, there is another “big lie” file about Oswald, also in response to the Dan Rather inquiries, in which the CIA goes to great lengths to say they knew nothing about Oswald before the assassination, something proven to be ridiculously false over the years, and something even Dan Rather raised questions about in his special.

    The second document in the 2021 file, however, dropped a bombshell, albeit with lawyerly language:

    Sirhan Sirhan’s security file reflects that he had never been of interest to the Agency prior to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. On 5 June 1968 when Sirhan was identified as the probable assassin, the Director of Central Intelligence met with the Deputy Chief of the CI Staff, the Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, and the Director of Security and directed that the CI staff would be the focal point for action in the Sirhan case. The CI staff was to collect all available information on Sirhan and provide appropriate portions of this material to the Office of Security for release to the Los Angeles Police Department. This material was to be released to the LAPD through the Office of Security’s Los Angeles Field Office.[3]

    (I found the use of “reflects that” telling, as if the file might have had more in it at one time but has been altered to “reflect” a certain version of events.)

    So James Angleton’s CIA Counterintelligence group was designated as the records collection point for the RFK assassination investigation, just as his team had run point for the JFK assassination, and could control what was released to the LAPD from the CIA’s end, by the CIA’s OS LAFO contact:

    Mr. William Curtin, the Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office, contacted Inspector Yarnell of the LAPD on 5 June 1968 and advised him that the Agency was prepared to cooperate with the LAPD in its investigation of Sirhan.

    From that one sentence, it appeared CIA initiated contact with the CIA first, but I wasn’t ready to declare a conclusion until I read Sirhan’s 815-page 201 file, released in 2025 by the Luna Committee. In there, we find this important bit of information from William Curtin himself:

    When the announcement of the Subject’s [Sirhan’s] identity and foreign background was made public on 5 June 1968, upon instructions from Headquarters, I contacted Inspector Harold YARNELL, in the absence of [LAPD] Chief Tom REDDIN.[4]

    Inspector Yarnell was a member of the LEIU – the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit – a private network of intelligence officers at various police departments across the country. Yarnell had been the Secretary-Treasurer of the LEIU and became the Commander of the LAPD Intelligence Division, where he interfaced with, among others, Lt. Jack Revill of the Dallas Police Department (named chief of the Dallas Intelligence Unit).[5]

    But it’s what Curtin wrote next that proved the CIA had forced its way into the investigation and not been invited:

    Inspector Yarnell was informed of our desire to aid the Los Angeles Police Department in any way that we could in the conduct of their investigation of the Subject. He expressed his appreciation and stated that they would gladly accept any information we wished to pass along to them. However, he advised that their case against the Subject appeared to be airtight and that he did not at that time foresee that they would be calling on us for any assistance.[6]

    In other words, the LAPD’s response to the CIA’s offer of help had been essentially, thank you, but no thank you. That is quite notable. The LAPD didn’t yet know what they didn’t know. But the CIA knew there would be things the LAPD didn’t know, names that would need to be investigated.

    Twelve days later, Inspector Yarnell called William back and set up a meeting with Yarnell, Captain Brown (the Chief of Homicide at LAPD) and Curtin. At this point, Yarnell’s tune changed slightly. Although they felt they had a rock-solid case against Sirhan (which they didn’t—see my book for why the case for Sirhan’s guilt falls flat), Yarnell said they were pursuing a possible conspiracy angle and needed information about Sirhan and possible associates. The CIA’s one request in response is that all mention of their cooperation be kept from the press. And for the most part, it was.

    But I find even this confession of the alliance and circumstances possibly incomplete, because Sirhan had not yet been identified when Chief Reddin gave his 7:00 a.m. press conference on June 5. As I wrote in my book, after viewing the tape from that conference:

    Throughout the press conference, Reddin’s delivery was calm, articulate, and professional, until he came to one particular question. He had just explained that the LAPD was checking with other agencies for any information they might have on the suspect— “the immigration service, the CIA, the Bureau of Customs, Social Security, the Post Office department—”

    “Why the CIA, Chief?” a reporter asked.

    Suddenly, Reddin became visibly rattled and nearly choked as he tried to get the agency’s name out. “The C-A … the C-A … the C-I-A has types of information that might help us identify who the person might be. We’ll give them his picture.” Reddin regained his composure shortly after, but it was a bizarre break—and the only such break—in an otherwise seamless presentation.[7]

    Perhaps Reddin had learned of the CIA’s call to Captain Brown and was planning to share their unknown suspect’s picture with the CIA, but right about this time, Munir Sirhan, the brother of Sirhan who was at his early morning job and watching the TV in the breakroom saw a picture of his brother on TV and went with his brother Adel to the local Pasadena police to identify him. So maybe Curtin’s timeline is an official lie.

    There’s also the weird question the LAPD asked Sirhan about him being married. After the shooting, Sirhan was extensively questioned for a few hours before Reddin heard Sirhan had asked for a lawyer and shut down the questioning. The LAPD and the DA’s assistant who questioned him recognized Sirhan was in some sort of dissociative state. He couldn’t remember what kind of car he drove and couldn’t or wouldn’t give his name. Even his interrogators didn’t believe he was lying. Before his identity had been revealed, one LAPD officer asked Sirhan if he were married (to which Sirhan replied, quite oddly, that he didn’t know).

    It turns out the CIA knew of another man called “Sirhan Sirhan” in the United States who was married, and had been married in 1957 (Sirhan Sirhan had never married and would have only been 13 at the time!), and a reporter with ties to the CIA and Israel named John Kimche had written about him a week after the assassination took place. Kimche thought the Sirhan he was writing about was the Sirhan Sirhan in custody because his source had been right so many times before. The CIA tracked down the man, identified by a friend as “Sirhan Sirhan,” and reported back that he was really Sirhan Salim Sirhan Abu Khadir, a resident of Detroit.”[8] But who told the LAPD within hours after the shooting that the guy in custody might have been married? Might the CIA have planted this story with Kimche after the fact to explain earlier initial misinformation? Had someone from Israel called it in to try to paint Sirhan as someone with ties to Al Fatah (which Sirhan Bishara Sirhan did not have)? Maybe the LAPD just asked if he was married for no reason. But they also asked if his name was “Jesse,” and there was, in fact, a suspect named “Jesse” that apparently had been taken into custody separately from Sirhan and released. So the question may not have been random at all.

    There are still many mysteries in this case. But the CIA pushing their way into the LAPD’s investigation, while not surprising to those who have long assumed a CIA hand in the assassination of RFK, is genuinely new information, with genuinely sinister implications.

    (Part 2 coming soon)

     

    1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-gabbard-rfk-assassination-files-release/

    2. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Feral House: 2025 paperback edition), pp. 98-99.

    3. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/SIRHAN%20SIRHAN%20INVESTIGATI%5B16011338%5D.pdf, p. 4

    4. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/rfk/releases/2025/0612/07165005_sirhan_sirhan_201.pdf, p. 24

    5. https://afsc.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/1979_NARMIC_Police%20Threat%20to%20Political%20Liberty.pdf, page 52.

    6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/SIRHAN%20SIRHAN%20201%5B16506077%5D.pdf, p. 74

    7. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Feral House: 2025 paperback edition), p. 58.

    8. Sirhan 201 file, p. 779.

  • New RFK Film – Rob Wilson, Sean Stone, and Oliver Stone – “Legacy”

    New RFK Film – Rob Wilson, Sean Stone, and Oliver Stone – “Legacy”

    Please see a review of the film here.

  • ACTION ALERT: The Sirhan Parole Hearing

    ACTION ALERT: The Sirhan Parole Hearing

    The Sirhan Parole Hearing

    Sirhan’s next parole hearing is on August 16th. His current lawyer, Angela Berry, is asking people to write the parole board. She suggests that rather than focusing on his innocence, the writer should accent his age, his record as a model prisoner, the fact prisons are overcrowded, he is not a threat to anyone at the age of 80, and the vociferous, emotional pleas of some of the next of kin should not override the law. If he is not a danger to society he should be paroled.

    Letters should be mailed to:

    Board of Parole Hearings

    P. O. Box 4036

    Sacramento CA 95812-4936

    ATTN: Pre hearing correspondence

    Email address is BPH.CorrespondenceUnit@cdcr.ca.gov.

    Open your letter with Dear Parole Board, and ask them to parole Sirhan with, in addition to the above, the fact that he has more than served his time.

    There is also a new law that says people under 26 at the time of their crime (Sirhan was 24) should have their youth weighted higher in their parole decisions. A key factor in someone getting paroled can be public interest, hence the request for our readers to write. You would be surprised how a few letters can change things. So please help

    Also cc Ms. Berry, forward to angela@guardingyourrights.com

  • News: California Panel Rejects Parole Again for Robert Kennedy Assassin

    News: California Panel Rejects Parole Again for Robert Kennedy Assassin

    A panel in the United States has denied parole for Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, saying the 78-year-old prisoner still lacks insight into what caused him to shoot the senator and presidential candidate in 1968. Sirhan’s lawyer Angela Berry disputed that assertion, saying Sirhan has shown that awareness and that his psychiatrists have said for decades that he is unlikely to re-offend or be a danger to society.

    Two years ago, a different California parole board had agreed with Berry, voting to release Sirhan, but Governor Gavin Newson rejected the decision in 2022. Berry said she believes the new board members on Wednesday were influenced by the California governor as well as by the lawyers representing Kennedy’s widow and some of his children. Several relatives of the slain politician, though not all, are opposed to Sirhan’s release.

    Read the rest of the article here.

  • ACTION ALERT: PLEASE ACT ON THIS TODAY!

    ACTION ALERT: PLEASE ACT ON THIS TODAY!

    As you know Sirhan Sirhan has been (falsely) imprisoned for the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy for over fifty years. His next parole hearing is for March 12th. His current attorney, Angela Berry is asking people to please write the Parole Board. But do not focus on his innocence, write about his age, 78, the fact that he has been a model prisoner, our prisons are overcrowded, and he is not a threat to anyone.

    Mail the letter to this address:

    State of California
    Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
    Board of Parole
    P. O. Box 4036
    Sacramento CA 95812-4936

    And mail Angela a copy also at her office address:

    Angela Berry
    75-5660 Kopiko Street, Suite C-7, #399
    Kailua-Kona, HI 96740

    If you would rather email your letter, please send to BPH.CorrespondenceUnit@cdcr.ca.gov for the Prison Corrections office and please include a copy for Angela Berry at angela@guardingyourrights.com

    Begin with “Dear Parole Board” and ask them to please parole Sirhan since he has served much longer than most prisoners charged with similar crimes. Plus he has been a very good prisoner while incarcerated.

    There is also a new law that says people under 26 at the time of their crime (Sirhan was 24) should have their youth weighed higher in the parole decision.

    A key factor in gaining parole is public interest; this is why we request you to write the letter. They are important in influencing opinion. Thank you and please act on this ASAP.

  • Gavin Newsom and Sirhan’s Parole

    Gavin Newsom and Sirhan’s Parole

    Today, California is one of only three states in which the governor has the ability to overrule a parole board decision.  Which means he has a political veto over a deliberative process. The other two states are Oklahoma and Maryland.  In Maryland, a bill is advancing through the legislature which would eliminate the gubernatorial veto.  And the citizens of the state support the change overwhelmingly.  I sincerely hope the same thing now happens in California.

    Since taking office in March of 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom has used this discretionary power rather often. To be exact, 46 times. On January 13th he again overruled the parole board, this time in the case of Sirhan Sirhan. In fact, on that day, Newsom wrote an editorial for the LA Times about his decision. He began that column by saying, “… Sirhan assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy just moments after Kennedy won the California presidential primary.” He then added that, “Decades later, Sirhan refuses to accept responsibility for the crimes.”

    He then stated what is likely the real reason for reversing the parole board. He mentioned that his murder left RFK’s “eleven children without a father and his wife without a husband.  Kennedy’s family bears his loss every day.” The Kennedy family made an extraordinary effort to keep Sirhan behind bars––in spite of the parole board’s verdict. They seem to have arranged a multi-platformed media crusade to both counter the parole board decision and also to neutralize the efforts of Robert Kennedy Jr. For he is the only member of that family who has spoken out against the official verdicts in both the John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy cases.

    For instance, Rory Kennedy wrote a piece in The New York Times on September 1st of last year titled, “The Man Who Murdered my Father Doesn’t Deserve Parole.” She  wrote that, “As my father was taken forever, so too should Mr. Sirhan be.”

    The majority of Robert Kennedy’s children––six of them––feel this way, and this helped give political cover to Newsom’s decision to veto the parole board.  The problem with this is dual.  First, the board has rules and guidelines it follows in order to make a decision.  Political advantage and familial vengeance should not be part of that process.  Secondly, as many have noted, Sirhan has served much longer for the charge he was convicted of than the normal term. What is the purpose of keeping him there so much longer when the board has deemed him no danger to society?

    Part of this crusade seems to simply stem from a reaction to RFK Jr’s outspokenness on the issue.  For decades, the policy of the Kennedy family had been not to speak out on the assassinations of either President Kennedy or Senator Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy Jr. changed that pattern. He began speaking out about it back in 2013 during a public appearance with Rory hosted by Charlie Rose in Dallas. (New Haven Register, Associated Press report January 12, 2013) He furthered his ideas on the subject matter with his book American Values in 2018.

    What is so ironic about this is that, as David Talbot’s book Brothers shows, Attorney General Robert Kennedy never bought the cover story about his brother’s death. In fact, within a week of JFK’s murder both Bobby and JFK’s widow, Jackie Kennedy, wrote a letter to the rulers in Moscow saying that they understood that Lee Oswald was simply a front man, and that President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a large domestic plot. (Talbot, pp. 32-34)

    Somehow, the majority of Robert Kennedy’s children cannot seem to understand this even though their father did. And if this is what Senator Kennedy thought, and he was on the verge of gaining the Democratic nomination, would those who killed President Kennedy hesitate to get rid of him? When, in fact, they murdered his brother while in a motorcade, in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses?

    Many of us have sympathized with the Kennedy family for decades.  After all, Jackie did not even want Bobby to run for the presidency. She feared that what happened to her husband would then happen to him. She was correct.

    But this is now 2022.  Why do we still have a Kennedy family deed of gift for the autopsy materials on John Kennedy? Which means their representative can rule on who sees those exhibits. Why are the notes by William Manchester on his book The Death of a President still ruled off limits to the public? That book was issued in 1967. And now the Kennedy family gets to influence whether or not Sirhan has served enough time in prison? I won’t even argue the idea that Sirhan not only did not but could not have committed the crime, since that should not be argued before the parole board.  Suffice it to say, Sirhan was railroaded by both the LAPD and the DA’s office. Due to his incompetent lawyers, the merits of his case were not argued in court.  In other words, the same thing that happened in the John Kennedy case occurred in the Robert Kennedy case. When Martin Luther King was being legally railroaded in Georgia during the 1960 presidential campaign, the Kennedy brothers intervened. And this showed the difference between them and Richard Nixon. (Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, by Harry Golden, pp. 20-22)

    California is a big, powerful, liberal state. Gavin Newsom just won a smashing victory against a recall effort. He must also be quite aware that former state Attorney General Kamala Harris is now the country’s vice-president. While state AG she had a perfect opportunity to reopen the RFK case.  She decided to fight the petition by Sirhan’s then attorneys Laurie Dusek and Bill Pepper. (see Lisa Pease, A Lie too Big to Fail, pp. 501-02) She understood that any effort to do the right thing in that case would be a detriment to career advancement. She put her finger in the wind and she went to the Senate and then the White House. Newsom clearly recalls the paradigm.

    Angela Berry is a specialist in these types of parole hearings and cases.  She is Sirhan’s present attorney.  She replied that Newsom “had bowed to political considerations in denying her client parole.” She then added that “the legal decision for his release is clear and straightforward.  We are confident that the judicial review of the governor’s decision will show that the governor got it wrong.”  She further asserted that state law holds that inmates are supposed to be paroled unless they pose a current unreasonable public safety risk. Yet “not an iota of evidence exists to suggest Mr. Sirhan is still a danger to society.”  And she noted that prison psychologists and psychiatrists had assessed his case in such a manner. To cinch the case that he poses no threat to society, Sirhan has waived his right to fight deportation. But prison does pose a threat to him, since Berry said he had his throat slashed by another inmate in 2019. (read the story here) 

    Let us end with this point of comparison: it should be noted that both Arthur Bremer and John Hinckley are both out of custody today. They both live in the United States. And Hinckley has his own YouTube channel to showcase his music.

  • Sirhan Sirhan Parole Letter

    Sirhan Sirhan Parole Letter

    To our readers:

    Sirhan’s case for parole has been decided in his favor—on the 16th try. If the entire parole board agrees with the original decision, then the case will be passed up to Governor Gavin Newsom. Please write him letters, in any way possible, and accent the following points:

    1. The Parole Board has spoken after a review of Sirhan’s case.
    2. Newsom’s decision should be made on the merits and legal doctrine, not on an angry outcry for vengeance.
    3. Sirhan has been through 16 parole hearings and at the 15th one, Paul Schrade, a victim in the Ambassador Hotel’s pantry that night, asked for his release.
    4. George Gascon, LA’s progressive prosecutor—who Newsom knows from San Francisco—did not send anyone to argue to the board that Sirhan be kept in prison.
    5. Sirhan has served a much longer time in prison, 53 years, than others who have been charged with the same crime. This indicates the reason to keep him behind bars is more political than legal.
    6. Sirhan has been a model prisoner. This should be a part of the governor’s decision, since it indicates he is not a danger to society.
    7. The law has been changed in regards to prisoners who committed a crime at a young age. The Board said this was a factor in their decision. It should also measure into the governor’s.
    8. Finally, at 77, Sirhan qualifies for elderly parole. He has also had his life endangered more than once while in prison, the last time being in 2019. (Click here for details)

    There are four ways to contact the governor: snail mail, fax, phone, and email. Click to this page for how to do all four:

    Contact the Governor

    Try and do this ASAP. There will be a lot of pressure on Newsom to decline the board decision. We need to act fast. This is what KennedysAndKing is all about.

  • Sirhan’s New Parole Hearing

    Sirhan’s New Parole Hearing

    Update:

    If you have sent a letter and still have a copy on your computer, please email a copy to contact@kennedysandking.com with your name on it. If you have not sent the letter yet, please send us a copy, before you snail mail it. Thanks. This is important. We would not ask you if it wasn’t.

    We now have a definite date for Sirhan Sirhan’s upcoming parole hearing. As we all know, the plague of CV–19 has set back trials and hearings throughout the country (e.g. the trial of the notorious millionaire Robert Durst in Los Angeles).

    The revised date for Sirhan’s parole hearing is August 27th, about three months from now, which gives our readers that much longer to compose letters asking for Sirhan to be properly released. This particular hearing should have another advantage to it. The new LA District Attorney, George Gascon, has a different policy than most of his predecessors concerning parole hearings.

    Gascon will not allow his assistant DA’s to attend these hearings. That, in itself, is a reversal of a longtime procedure, because almost inevitably, these deputies would argue that the criminal should not be paroled. To his credit, Gascon’s policy has broken with this concept. (Click here for details) As he has said, that former policy assumed the individual had not evolved. Under Gascon’s policy, he will support parole for low or moderate risk cases, which the record says Sirhan certainly was and is.

    Due to what former California Attorney General, and now Vice President, Kamala Harris did with the Sirhan case, he probably will not get a new trial. The ambitious Harris understood that if this new trial was granted, Sirhan would likely go free. (Click here for details) She did not want that to occur on her watch.

    As Lisa Pease proves in her milestone book on the RFK case, A Lie too Big to Fail, Sirhan was convicted because his defense team was both incompetent and compromised. The case of the murder of Robert Kennedy is even more obviously a conspiracy than the case of John F. Kennedy. As anyone who reads Pease’s book will understand, not only did Sirhan not shoot Bobby Kennedy, he could not have done so. Not with the facts of Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy on the table and demonstrated in court, which they were not. (See Pease, pp. 65–69, 255–91)

    Because of the inept performance by Sirhan’s defense team, Sirhan was convicted. And the defendant has been in prison since 1969, a total of about 52 years. The reason for this updated notice is that Sirhan has a new attorney and part of her specialty is these types of hearings. His current attorney, Angela Berry, is requesting that interested parties write the parole board.

    But, and this is important, do not focus on the facts of the case in order to prove his innocence. I have done so ever so slightly here only to try and motivate the reader into writing on his behalf. Berry suggests instead that the writer of the letter accent things like Sirhan’s age, his spotless record in prison, the fact that the prisons are overcrowded, and that he is not a threat to anyone.

    In fact, he once said that if he ever got out, he would like to live a quiet life somewhere and help people if he could. (William Klaber and Philip Melanson, Shadow Play, p. 318) One might also add that Sirhan has served a much longer time than others convicted of homicide.

    Also, there is a new law in effect (see pages 7 and 9 of Youth Offender Parole here). This says that people under age 26 at the time of the crime—Sirhan was 24—should have their youth weighed higher in the parole decision. Berry adds that a key factor in a parole hearing can be public opinion. Hence, this appeal for you to write. That, plus Gascon’s new policy, could be influential in the outcome.

    Letters should be mailed to:

    State of California

    Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, Board of Parole

    Post Office Box 4036

    Sacramento CA 95812-4936

    Open with “Dear Parole Board” and ask them to parole Sirhan in accordance with the fact that he has served his time. Under normal conditions, being a model prisoner, Sirhan likely would have been released in 1985. (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby?, p. 3)

    Please do this ASAP. You will get a note in reply to certify your letter has arrived.

  • Sirhan’s Upcoming Parole Hearing

    Sirhan’s Upcoming Parole Hearing

    Anyone who knows anything about the assassination of Robert Kennedy should understand that his assassination is in some ways even more clearly a conspiracy than the murder of President Kennedy. The true facts of the case were covered up by the local authorities, and the defense team was—to put it mildly—rather less than zealous in their obligations to their client, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. The best analysis of Sirhan’s phony trial is in Lisa Pease’s book A Lie Too Big to Fail. (See pp. 135–95) And in this author’s opinion, that is the best, most comprehensive book we have on the Bobby Kennedy case.

    As both Lisa Pease and the late Philip Melanson have noted, Sirhan’s defense was so inept—as we shall see, it may have been compromised—that they let the prosecution’s psychiatrist talk directly to their client. This is something he was not supposed to do and it would appear to be an ethical violation by Sirhan’s lead lawyer, Grant Cooper. What makes this more than just odd is that, as Pease notes, Cooper was accused of bribing a court clerk in order to pilfer grand jury transcripts and then lying to a judge about it. His investigation for these violations was going on at the time of Sirhan’s trial. (See Pease’s earlier article, “Rubik’s Cube”, Probe Magazine, Volume 5 Number 4)

    It then gets even more curious. After his inept defense of Sirhan, Cooper got off with a slap on the wrist for this offense: he was fined a thousand dollars. The late Larry Teeter, one of Sirhan’s attorneys, thought the light penalty for the serious violations was a result of Cooper’s rather dubious performance for Sirhan. Teeter voiced this opinion with the author in an in-person interview in late 2002.

    Perhaps that is one way to explain the direct interviews that the prosecution’s Seymour Pollack had with Sirhan. Pollack was a forensic psychiatrist from USC employed by the prosecution. That Cooper allowed this to occur was so unethical that defense assistant and later author on the RFK case, Robert Blair Kaiser, tried to say it did not happen. (Kaiser, RFK Must Die!, p. 151) But it did and the forensic psychiatrist spent hours with Sirhan trying to supply him with a motive for why he really killed Bobby Kennedy. What was that motive? Because he was standing up for the Arabs against Israel. (Philip Melanson, The Robert Kennedy Assassination, p. 152) In fact, Pollack went as far as to say that it would be better for his case if he did say this, than to say that he did not really know what his motive was. What is even more remarkable about this is that Cooper’s own psychiatrist, Bernard Diamond, ended up joining Pollack in trying to get Sirhan to say this. In fact, Diamond did this when he had Sirhan under hypnosis. (Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, pp. 417–18)

    One of the most oft repeated external indications of this motive was one that was used not just by the prosecution, but again, by the defense. And not just Sirhan’s original team, but later lawyers like Luke McKissack. It consisted of an entry in Sirhan’s notebooks which contained a notation on May 18, 1968, with the refrain “RFK must die”. The original story made up by the prosecution was that Sirhan saw a TV special that day in which candidate Kennedy endorsed a sale of fighter aircraft to Israel made by President Johnson. There is a very large problem with this allegedly incriminating scenario. The TV special did not air on May 18th, but on May 20th. (Philip Melanson and William Klaber, Shadow Play, pp. 136–37). Further, there was no mention of the weapons sale in the program. (ibid) Yet, the tall tale has grown so long, that years later Kennedy was supposed to be endorsing the deal in the program while in a temple wearing a yarmulke. This was a myth meant to supply Sirhan with some kind of motive, since initially he said he did not recall the circumstances of the shooting and did not know why he performed the act.

    As anyone who has read Pease’s book understands, not only did Sirhan not shoot Bobby Kennedy, he could not have shot the senator. It is simply a physical impossibility in light of Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy. (See Pease, pp. 65–69; pp. 255–91) All the indications are that Sirhan was under post hypnotic suggestion at the time of the shooting and, further, that he was being manipulated by a young, attractive woman in a polka-dot dress. This woman actually led Sirhan into the pantry after they had drank coffee together. And they were standing next to each other in the pantry while Kennedy was walking through. (Pease, p. 50) She was one of the very few people who actually ran out of the pantry area after the shooting.

    That young woman has all the indications of being the same person who Sandy Serrano saw after the shooting. Serrano was a Kennedy worker, who was standing outside the Ambassador Hotel to get some fresh air. The young lady ran down the stairs to the hotel and she yelled, “We’ve shot him! We’ve shot him!” When Serrano asked who she shot, the reply was, “We’ve shot Senator Kennedy.” When newsman Sander Vanocur interviewed Serrano live on national television, he had delayed reaction to what Serrano said. After a delay, he went back and asked, “Did this young lady say ‘we’?” Serrano replied in the affirmative. (Pease, pp. 35–36)

    Serrano never testified at Sirhan’s trial. Yet, her testimony clearly denotes some kind of a conspiracy. Combined with the incompatible forensics of the case, Sirhan should have been acquitted. As Pease demonstrates, for many, many reasons, this did not happen. Between the efforts of the LAPD to cover up the case, the incompetence—or worse—of Sirhan’s attorneys, and a rather sickening performance by the media, Sirhan was convicted. But it’s actually worse than that, because of the three monumental cases of the sixties—the murders of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy—that one became known as the “open and shut case”. In other words, you could not even ask any questions about it. When, as I noted earlier, it is the one in which the facts of the case most easily disprove the guilty verdict.

    Unfortunately for both Sirhan and justice, the defendant has been in prison since 1969, a total of over 51 years. The reason for this notice is that Sirhan has a new parole hearing that is coming up on March 21st. His current attorney, Angela Berry, is requesting that interested parties write the parole board.

    But, and this is important, do not focus on the facts of the case in order to prove his innocence. I have done so here only to try and motivate the reader into writing on his behalf. She suggests instead that the writer of the letter accent things like Sirhan’s age, his spotless record in prison, the fact that the prisons are overcrowded and he is not a threat to anyone.

    In fact, he once said that if he ever got out, he would like to live a quiet life somewhere and help people if he could. (Klaber and Melanson, p. 318) One might also add that Sirhan has served a much longer time than others convicted of homicide.

    Also, there is a new law (see pages 7 and 9 of Youth Offender Parole, prison.law.com) that says people under age 26 at the time of the crime—Sirhan was 24—should have their youth weighed higher in the parole decision. A key factor in a parole hearing can be public opinion. Hence this appeal for you to write.

    Letters should be mailed to:

    State of California Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
    Board of Parole
    P. O. 4036
    Sacramento, CA 95812-4936

    Open with “Dear Parole Board:” and ask them to parole Sirhan in accordance with the fact that he has served his time. Under normal conditions, being a model prisoner, Sirhan likely would have been released in 1985. (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? p. 3)

    Thanks in advance. This kind of activism is what this site is about.