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U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded by a gunshot in Los Angeles at approximately 12:15AM on June 5, 1968, and died 26 hours later.

The convicted assassin, 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Bishara Sirhan is widely thought to have been acting alone. Sirhan attributed the killing to Kennedy's support for Israel during and after the Six-Day War, although there is no record of RFK supporting Israel during that period. On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles, California court, Sirhan admitted that he had killed Kennedy. Sirhan has since recanted, and as late as 1998 has sought a new trial. [1] Various vocal critics have claimed the official account of Robert Kennedy's death is inconsistent and incomplete (see below).

Contents 1 Background 2 Assassination 3 As it happened on television 3.1 Conspiracy theories 3.1.1 Additional conspirators? 3.1.2 CIA operatives 3.2 Sirhan's motivations 3.2.1 Brainwashing 3.3 References in popular culture 3.4 See also 3.5 References 3.6 External links

[edit] Background

As U.S. Senator for New York, Kennedy had 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. The evening he was shot, Kennedy had won the June 4 Democratic Presidential primaries in South Dakota and California, boosting his chances for the Democratic nomination for President during the 1968 presidential election.

[edit] Assassination

Kennedy addressed his supporters shortly after midnight on June 5 in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. At about 12:15AM, Kennedy and his entourage walked through a kitchen pantry, shaking hands with well-wishers and hotel staff. The small pantry was rather crowded, when a 24-year-old man named Sirhan Sirhan stepped in front of Kennedy and allegedly shouted "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!"^[1] before firing an eight shot, .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver toward Kennedy and his entourage.

Maître d'hôtel Karl Uecker, writer George Plimpton, Olympic gold medalist decathlete Rafer Johnson and professional football player Rosey Grier helped detain Sirhan, with Grier jamming his thumb behind the trigger of the revolver to prevent further shots from being fired, as he had no way of knowing in the confusion if all the shots had been fired.

[edit] As it happened on television

The shooting was not broadcast live but the resultant scuffle was recorded on audio tape by reporter Andrew West of KRKD, a Mutual radio affiliate. [2]. On the stage just after the speech, West had asked Kennedy a brief question about how he would go about overcoming Vice President Hubert Humphrey's lead in delegates to the Democratic National Convention (in a garbled response, Kennedy indicated a "struggle" lay ahead for the nomination). As West followed the Kennedy party into the kitchen area, he turned his tape recorder back on after hearing shouts that Kennedy had been shot.

CBS Television continued feeding live pictures of the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room ballroom in the moments after Kennedy had left the ballroom's podium. For the next two minutes, CBS cameras panned the dispersing crowd of RFK supporters in the Embassy Room ballroom as well as another crowd of RFK supporters downstairs in the hotel's Ambassador Room ballroom. As microphones picked up the sound of supporters in the Ambassador Room chanting "rah rah rah", a CBS camera showed supporters in the Embassy Room reacting to the shooting that had just taken place, off-camera, in the kitchen pantry. As CBS's audio feed then switched from the Ambassador Room to the Embassy Room, the ballroom's northside service doors leading to the pantry could be seen swinging open while the sounds of screaming and chaos could be heard. The joyous crowd was now overcome with confusion and panic. CBS News correspondent Terry Drinkwater, standing at the podium where RFK had just spoken, asked someone what happened. An unidentified man answered: "Somebody said he's been shot". Drinkwater then advised his CBS colleagues to "make sure we are rolling videotape". From the podium, RFK supporters called out for doctors and Kennedy's brother-in-law Steven Smith (with wife Jean Kennedy Smith at his side) calmly asked the crowd to leave the room. The first people Drinkwater approached were unable to provide any information; eventually, he and other newsmen were given some details from other individuals who had been witnesses to either the shooting or its aftermath.

Kennedy was shot twice in his back and once behind his right ear at very close range. A fourth shot grazed Kennedy's clothing. As Kennedy lay on the floor, bleeding heavily, he asked if anyone else was hurt. Five other people were wounded: William Weisel of ABC News (30), Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers (43), Democratic Party activist Elizabeth Evans (43), 19-year-old radio reporter Ira Goldstein, and 17-year-old Kennedy volunteer Irwin Stroll. [3] Although not physically wounded, singer Rosemary Clooney, a great supporter of Kennedy's, was present at the shooting and suffered a nervous breakdown shortly afterwards (see: http://www.cincypost.com/2002/jul/01/rostim070102.html). Kennedy was pronounced dead the next day.

[edit] Conspiracy theories

Many claims of a "second shooter" point to a part-time armed security guard escorting Kennedy, a 26-year-old Lockheed aerospace worker named Thane Eugene Cesar who had been called to work at the Ambassador at the last minute by his employer, Ace Guard Services. According to witnesses, Cesar had been standing closest to Kennedy on the Senator's right and slightly to the rear when Sirhan had begun firing. Apparently, Kennedy suddenly grabbed Cesar's clip-on necktie with his right hand when hit as that tie was less than a foot away from the Senator's right hand while he was lying fatally wounded on the hotel's kitchen floor. Interviewed by Los Angeles police detectives shortly after the assassination, Cesar admitted on tape that he had removed his revolver from his holster during the shooting in the pantry but insisted he never fired it. Cesar also admitted to investigator Theodore Charach that he had owned a .22-caliber revolver similar to Sirhan's, but claimed he had sold the weapon in February 1968, a claim eventually proved to have been false, as it had been later discovered that Cesar had instead sold it three months after the assassination. The buyer of that revolver had later reported it as stolen. The revolver that Cesar turned over to the LAPD was not test-fired by the police, because it was .38 caliber and all the slugs recovered were .22 caliber.

But skeptics, such as Dan Moldea, author of The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, have said that Cesar was never considered a serious suspect for good reason: No eyewitnesses saw Cesar shoot Kennedy. Moldea tracked Cesar down and gave him a polygraph test which Moldea said exonerated Cesar.

[edit] Additional conspirators?

Los Angeles police sergeant Paul Sharaga and a young Kennedy campaign worker named Sandy Serrano had both claimed a young Hispanic man and a young Caucasian woman with blonde hair (the latter wearing a "polka dot" dress) had quickly burst out of a rear service exit of the Ambassador Hotel's kitchen moments after the shooting exclaiming, "We shot him." Asked "who?", she responded, "Senator Kennedy!" Sgt. Sharaga was made aware of the suspicious duo by a middle-aged married couple who had frantically flagged him down shortly after he had pulled his squad car into one of the hotel's parking lots. Sharaga immediately issued an all points bulletin for the younger couple, one soon canceled without explanation by his superiors while Serrano had later been coerced by police into changing her story. A San Diego high school student, Lisa Urso, who had been present in the hotel kitchen pantry when Kennedy was shot, claims she had seen a blonde young man in a gray business suit place a revolver in a holster under his jacket when Sirhan began shooting and also saw a dark haired man in a black business suit fire a handgun into the ceiling and then run away from the scene.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] CIA operatives

On November 20, 2006 BBC's Newsnight presented research by Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several CIA agents were present on the night of the assassination. 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, Los Angeles on June 5th, 1968. Amongst 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 incident. 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 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 that the CIA had no jurisdiction over. ^{[2][3] [4]}

[edit] Sirhan's motivations

According to author Loren Coleman in 'The Copycat Effect (New York: Paraview Pocket-Simon and Schuster, 2004, ISBN 0-7434-8223-9), the date of the assassination is significant, as 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, with 9/11 being the most recent example. Coleman suggests Sirhan saw himself as a Palestinian militant. However, it is also noteworthy to add that Sirhan was a Christian, not a Muslim.

In a diary police found at Sirhan's home, he reportedly wrote: "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more and more [sic] 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." Many documents, though, among them the remarkable movie by Ted Charach, show that the expert graphologist cited to the court proved that this diary was a forgery, with many inconsistencies : handwriting of these pages differ totally from Sirhan's handwriting.

[edit] Brainwashing

Sirhan claimed he acted unconsciously, and that he has no memory of the shooting. This has led to speculations that he was acting under the influence of "hypnotic brainwashing" which many attribute to the CIA's MK-Ultra program (similar to the plot of The Manchurian Candidate).

The late author George Plimpton, one of the four men who had initially subdued Sirhan, commented that Sirhan had maintained what Plimpton judged to be an unusually calm, peaceful, or dreamlike expression on his face amid all of the terror and confusion.

[edit] References in popular culture

The Rolling Stones were recording Beggar's Banquet when Robert Kennedy was shot. A lyric in "Sympathy for the Devil" was subsequently changed from "I shouted out, 'Who killed John Kennedy?'" to "I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?'"

In Alan J. Pakula's film The Parallax View a US Presidential hopeful is assassinated by a livried bellhop on the observation deck of the Seattle Space Needle amid a crowd of wellwishers. A girl in a polka-dot dress is briefly glimpsed in the confusion.

The novels in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) have a number of references to the RFK assassination, including the underground newspaper Confrontation reopening the investigation and a character who had written a manuscript titled How the Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy Plotted and Carried Out the Assassinations of Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Lincoln Rockwell, Robert Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, George Wallace, Jane Fonda, Gabriel Conrad, and Hank Brummer.

The feature film Bobby was released by MGM on November 17, 2006. The film portrays a fictional account of the Ambassador Hotel on the day RFK was killed. This Emilio Estevez production recreates the ambience and themes of 1968, and laments the lost hopes when RFK was killed, but does not offer any historical interpretation or analysis. The movie depicts Sirhan shooting five fictional characters in addition to Kennedy (with no treatment of whether Sirhan acted alone) and does not depict the five people who were actually wounded, nor any other key people who were present (Plimpton, West, Grier, Johnson, Enyart, Cesar, Morales, Sharaga, Serrano, etc.).

The plot of the first season of the TV series 24 concerns an assassination attempt on a Democratic presidental candidate on the day of a Californian presidential primary.

[edit] See also

• Kennedy assassination theories
• Sirhan Sirhan
• Kennedy Curse

[edit] References

1. ^ Thom White (2005). RFK Assassination Far From Resolved. CITIZINEmag. Retrieved on February 16, 2007.
2. ^ "CIA role claim in Kennedy killing", Newsnight, BBC News, 2006-11-21. Retrieved on November 21, 2006.
3. ^ O'Sullivan, Shane. "Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?", Guardian, 2006-11-20. Retrieved on November 21, 2006.
4. ^ http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/112206CARMICHAEL.html

[edit] External links

• Los Angeles Police Dept. Records -- From the Online Archive of California
• Who Killed Robert F. Kennedy? -- From conspiracy theorist Pat Shannan
• 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
• The Assassinations -- Book on the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X, published by Feral House.
• Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Collections -- Articles disputing that Sirhan killed Kennedy
• The RFK Assassination (argues in favor of a conspiracy)
• 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, late P.H. Melanson, Ph.D., Chancellor Professor of Policy Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (most recently in show #290b)
• Blackop Radio Interviews with RFK assassination photographer James Scott Enyart (most recently in show #271)
• The Klaber's RFK Tapes William Klaber's 1993 Golden Reef Award nominated radio documentary and interview
• "The Second Gun," a 1973 Golden Globe nominated documentary directed by Gérard Alcan
• Ted Charach interview Co-producer of the "The Second Gun"
• Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy? (alternate) by Shane O'Sullivan in The Guardian, November 20, 2006.
• Chicago '68 by Alvin Susumu Tokunow (1968)
• Citizine: RFK Assasssination Far From Resolved by Thom White