RFK

New York Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy died from gunshot wounds 50 years ago today. RFK’s assassination represented a turning point in American political history. At the time of his assassination, RFK was only 42 years old with a promising future ahead of him. Even if he had failed to win in 1968, he would have remained a formidable contender in subsequent elections. Indeed, it seems safe to say that had he lived, RFK would have been a major force in American politics well into the 1990s.

But his assassination is also historically important for another reason: it left a legacy of public distrust and cynicism that remains entrenched in our politics today. 

The Assassination Facts

The underlying facts of the RFK assassination are quite straightforward. Kennedy was shot three times by Sirhan Sirhan, an unemployed Jordanian immigrant who resented RFK’s support for Israel during the 1967 Six Days War. According to RFK biographer Evan Thomas, Sirhan bought the ammunition he used to kill Kennedy after seeing a “TV report of Kennedy wearing a yarmulke outside a synagogue” during a campaign appearance in California. 

The assassination happened in Los Angeles just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Sirhan murdered the senator in a kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy and his supporters were celebrating RFK’s victory in the crucial California presidential primary, the last remaining contest before the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. One of Sirhan’s bullets entered Kennedy’s brain, and despite heroic efforts by surgeons to save his life, the senator died at Good Samaritan Hospital on June 6.  Here is the famous announcement of Kennedy’s death by longtime Kennedy aide Frank Mankiewicz.

There is no reasonable doubt whatsoever of Sirhan’s guilt or the fact that he acted alone. The kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel was filled with people who witnessed the assassination, including RFK’s wife, a number of Kennedy’s aides, and many journalists. After the assassination, the police found at Sirhan’s apartment his diary, which included the statement, “Robert F. Kennedy must be killed.” In a television appearance, Sirhan admitted his guilt and expressed remorse for killing Kennedy during a 1989 interview with David Frost at the state prison in Soledad, California. Describing RFK as his “hero,” Sirhan told Frost: “I can’t say anything except that I am totally sorry and feel nothing but remorse for having caused that tragic death.” Sirhan, who in 1997 stunned the California parole board by belatedly changing his story and claiming innocence, remains in prison today serving a life sentence. 

The Conspiracy Theories

Despite the overwhelming evidence of Sirhan’s guilt, conspiracy theories regarding RFK’s death continue to circulate. Even Kennedy’s son, RFK Jr., has promoted them, claiming that Sirhan did not fire the fatal shot. But it should also be noted that Kennedy Jr. has a history of embracing baseless conspiracy theories. He is a very public critic of many vaccines, accusing public health authorities of conspiring with drug manufacturers. For example, in an error-filled 2005 article he wrote for Rolling Stone, he claimed, “Our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children.”  

The assassination conspiracy theories embraced by RFK Jr. largely arise from two facts: when the shooting began Sirhan stood in front of Sen. Kennedy, yet the fatal shot entered Kennedy’s brain from behind his right ear. Second, many conspiracy theorists maintain that 13 shots were fired, whereas Sirhan’s gun only held 8 bullets. Conspiracy theorists thus claim that there was a second gunman in the pantry that night.

The conspiracy theories, however, fall apart on closer inspection. First, not a single witness in the crowded pantry saw any shooter other than Sirhan. Second, there is a simple and obvious explanation for why Kennedy would have had an entry wound in the back of his head. As the eyewitnesses later explained, when the shooting began Kennedy defensively and quite understandably turned his head away from Sirhan. The back of RFK’s head was thus exposed to the fatal shot. Third, most witnesses only heard 8 shots, not 13. Moreover, although conspiracy theorists claimed that an audiotape of the assassination captured the sound of 13 shots, audio experts who examined it detected only 8 shots.

There was a good summary of the main conspiracy theories in the Washington Post yesterday. The definitive book on the subject is Dan Moldea’s The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity, which concludes that Sirhan murdered Kennedy.

Boris Yaro’s Account

There is also a great interview today in the Los Angeles Times of Boris Yaro, a Times photographer who saw the entire assassination unfold in front of him. Yaro took the tragically iconic photograph of a stricken but still conscious RFK sprawled on the ground, his head cradled by Juan Romero, a hotel busboy.

As Yaro explains in the interview, he went to the Ambassador Hotel hoping to take pictures of RFK, the candidate that Yaro expected to be elected president that year. But when the shooting began in the kitchen pantry, Yaro put his camera aside for a moment and helped wrestle the gun from Sirhan’s hand. He then took the haunting photo of Kennedy and Romero. 

Here is a passage from Patt Morrison’s interview of Yaro. It begins with Yaro describing what happened after Kennedy gave the famous speech at the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, celebrating his victory in the California primary. Unable to make his way through the festive crowd in the ballroom, RFK and his entourage made the spontaneous decision to go through the kitchen pantry. 

Yaro: So he left the podium and I went moving back. . . . Finally, Kennedy stopped walking and was surrounded by a cluster of people shaking hands. I’m in the pantry and I’m trying to get a picture of his face and [him] shaking hands, and somebody set firecrackers off — CRACK CRACK CRACK! They weren’t firecrackers. They were bullets. I got hit in the face by debris from the revolver. . . . All of a sudden, I realize — the guy’s got a gun.

Patt Morrison (the Interviewer): You saw him, and the gun.

Yaro: I’m going to show you something: He had a revolver in his hand. Play like you’re Bobby Kennedy. Take a boxer position. And Sirhan pulled the trigger and finally at one point aimed down on Kennedy’s head.

Morrison: So Kennedy saw Sirhan with the gun and brought up his hands defensively?

Yaro: Yeah. And Bobby was doing the boxing thing, trying to stop bullets.

Morrison: How far away was he from Bobby Kennedy?

Yaro: Oh, Sirhan? Closer than you and I [across a tabletop from each other]. And I was on the side of a waist-high freezer. I saw two or three people grab Sirhan; they grabbed him, and he had the revolver still in hand, and they slammed it down on the freezer countertop right in front of me. I was about two, three feet away. I didn’t think about making a picture of that. My eye was on the revolver that was now sitting loose on the top. And Sirhan tried to reach for it and I go, BS — I didn’t say that, but I think it — and I reached under the guy who was holding Sirhan on his left side. I reached in and grabbed [the gun].

You can find the whole interview here on the Los Angeles Times website. It is quite moving, particularly when Yaro discusses his lifelong (though completely unfounded) guilt for not stopping Sirhan from killing Kennedy.

The Assassination’s Continuing Legacy

RFK’s assassination, coming at a time of national crisis and historic upheaval, landed a devastating emotional blow on the country. A good example is found in the account of the famous Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in his autobiography, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. When Sirhan began shooting, the Washington Post’s Dick Harwood was standing immediately next to RFK. After bystanders restrained Sirhan and attended to Kennedy, Harwood raced to a phone to call the Post’s newsroom. A workaholic, Ben Bradlee was still in the building, even though it was long past midnight on the east coast. After he got Harwood’s call, Bradlee shouted “Stop the presses” in the newsroom, and the Post’s staff quickly put together a new extra edition of the morning paper with the shocking news of Kennedy’s shooting.

Only when Bradlee left the building did the enormity of the events in California sink in. As he explained in his autobiography, “And then I went home in the morning’s early light, sat down at the kitchen table, and cried uncontrollably for an hour. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t speak.”

Millions of Americans had the same reaction, even those who did not support RFK’s politics. Coming on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968, and amid the national uproar over the Vietnam War, college protests, race riots, and the counterculture, RFK’s assassination made clear that the decade’s high hopes for a new era of national progress and unity were over. As Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin explained, the optimism of the 1960s “came to an end in a Los Angeles hospital on June 6, 1968.” 

The United States has never really been the same country since the bloody spring of 1968. A profound and divisive cynicism took root and 50 years later we still have not been able to shake it. It should come as no surprise then that conspiracy theories have thrived in the years since, aided enormously by the internet, which has made the global propagation of baseless and profoundly cynical allegations easier than ever before.

To be sure, there are also innumerable good things that have come with the internet. One of the medium’s great virtues is how it has made historical footage so widely available, including many major events of the 1960s. For example, here is the audio of Robert F. Kennedy’s unforgettable April 1968 Indianapolis speech when he announced to a crowd of stunned campaign supporters that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated that night in Memphis, Tennessee. It is just over 5 minutes long.

Robert Kennedy’s Indianapolis speech is every bit as timely and urgent in 2018 as it was in 1968.

Finally, here is the moving eulogy that Ted Kennedy gave at his brother Robert’s funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. It also is only about 5 minutes long. 

         

Comments

[Anon]

Perhaps the greatest act of political terror in 20th Century American history. While JFK's murder was (of course) tragic, his policies remained the administration's priorities until derailed by Vietnam. OTOH, once RFK had been murdered, the deeply cynical politics of Nixon became the dominant narrative (to his eventual downfall and disgrace). I weep for the more compassionate country we might have had with the conscience of RFK in the Senate, Cabinet, or White House.

What might have been...

[anon]

Reviewing Bobby Kennedy, The Making of a Liberal Icon, By Larry Tye in the Washington Post on July 22, 2016, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough stated, “From Bobby’s eager role as a friend and aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, to his disdain for Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination, to his hatred of homosexuals, to his use of dirty tricks against political opponents, to the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. — whom Kennedy never trusted or liked — to his role in an assassination plot against Fidel Castro, Tye gives the reader an unflinching look at Kennedy’s darkest side …”

In fact, as noted recently in the New Republic, RFK wasn’t a liberal at all. See, RFK, Civic Republican What a Bobby Kennedy presidency could have meant for American political life, By Win McCormack May 25, 2018.

It is simply a fact that “liberals” (as they like to call themselves) are suckers for good-looking charmers, who speak in cultured tones and exude a sort of “sophistication” they associate with goodness. Because they rarely, if ever, apply to their hero celebrity-like politicians the same critical analysis that they do to their political adversaries, these "liberals" wind up supporting and propping up many actions that they could never accept in a "conservative."

This child-like idol-worship is what makes so many Americans recoil in revulsion at the “liberal” stance: "We are holy and beyond reproach, and you are deplorable."

What would a RFK presidency have wrought? Who knows? As noted above, this man was responsible for some very seriously wrong acts against democracy and against “liberal” icons. Did he speak in an inspirational manner? You bet. Was he good looking and "cool"? Ever so much so. Is this, folks, the test?

Until the Democrats begin to examine their own unexamined flaws there will be no progress in this country. When Democrats begin to realize that their worship of beauty and grace in political leaders does not mean that those leaders are flawless, effective or even "good," we will have what we have now: a Democratic party that claims “We are perfect (just look at/listen to him!) and you are evil”

[Anon]

I think RFK shows that people can change. They can learn. Evolve. Cultivate compassion. And re-evaluate their path. Conservatives - at least he current crop - are incapable of any of that.

And to respond to your latest nonsense, the sentence "these 'liberals' wind up supporting and propping up many actions that they could never accept in a 'conservative'" reminds me very much of the current crop of "conservatives" who, since their man is in power, no longer care about values, honesty, decency, decorum, or character. To whatever extent that liberals have hero worship (and I disagree with the premise), the current complete abdication of character by the "moral majority' types will not be judged kindly by the pages of history.

But I'd love to hear (again) why liberals are always the problem.

[anon]

"Conservatives - at least he current crop - are incapable of any of that."
" "conservatives" who, since their man is in power, no longer care about values, honesty, decency, decorum, or character. "
"your latest nonsense"
"the current complete abdication of character by the "moral majority' types"

QED

[Anon]

I stand by all of those statements as accurately depicting the cesspool of the current situation in DC.

Seems to me the real problem is one who can dish it out but cant take it.

[anon]

Anon

Let's see, you accuse a commenter of "not being able to take it" after letting loose with an unseemly barrage of falsehoods.

Let's take one apart, just for the fun of exposing your muddy thinking. You state: "conservatives" ... since their man is in power, no longer care about values, honesty, decency, decorum, or character."

You must live in a very tightly sealed bubble. The notion that no "conservative" has addressed any of these issues with respect to the object of your quite obviously out of control hostility is risible. You paint with such a broad brush that you render your statement a patent falsehood. YOu may be too angry or uninformed to know this, so the correct adjective would probably be "ignorant" and not "liar."

But, more importantly, you seem to be unable to read very well. If you had read the comment above that set off your tirade of insults, you would have seen a plea to examine "both sides" equally ... not a defense of one.

The fact that you seem to be incapable of understanding that point, and, the fact that you write such obscenely angry and vicious misstatements, essentially branding half of your fellow citizens as "deplorables" is, as stated above, proof of the point.

WHy don't you turn some of that viciousness on someone on "your side"? In response, you overstate the point (you spit, "But I'd love to hear (again) why liberals are always the problem." That is a total straw person. No one so claimed. Ultra-liberals are "a" problem though. Can you not understand? You claim that no "conservative" will criticize or find fault with another conservative. This is, in context, pure projection.

Not only is this juvenile retort non responsive, it is loony.

The real tell is this one: "Seems to me the real problem is one who can dish it out but cant take it. "

Again, pure projection. I could argue with you all day and not feel even a little bit upset. You remind of a kid in the store having a tantrum, and, to me, your ranting is quite funny.

You, on the other hand, appear to have become unglued at the very hint of any fault in RFK.

QED