RFK Assassination

On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan shortly after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. He was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. PDT the following day.

Kennedy was a senator from New York and a candidate in the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primaries. On June 4, 1968, he won the California and South Dakota primary elections. He addressed his campaign supporters in the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room ballroom. After leaving the podium, and exiting through a kitchen hallway, he was mortally wounded by multiple shots fired by Sirhan. Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital nearly 26 hours later. His body was buried at Arlington National Cemetery near his brother John F. Kennedy's grave.

Sirhan was a Palestinian who held strong anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian beliefs. In 1969, he testified that he killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought"; he was convicted and sentenced to death. Due to the court case ''People v. Anderson,'' his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 with a possibility of parole. As of January 2022, his parole request has been denied 16 times.

Kennedy's assassination prompted the Secret Service to protect presidential candidates. Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee but ultimately lost the election to Republican candidate Richard Nixon. Kennedy's assassination has led to several conspiracy theories. No credible evidence has emerged that Sirhan was not the shooter, or that he did not act alone. It has been described as one of four major assassinations in the United States that occurred during the 1960s.

Background

Robert F. Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1925. In 1948, he visited Palestine and wrote six dispatches for ''The Boston Post''. He dismissed the possibility of the Jewish state becoming communist as "fantastically absurd", and called it the "only stabilizing factor remaining in the near and middle East". In 1960, John F. Kennedy, his elder brother, was elected the president of the United States. He appointed Robert as the attorney general. During his tenure, Robert served as John's close advisor and was associated with various decisions during the Kennedy administration. According to author Matthew A. Hayes, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert acted as a "de-facto Chief of Staff, Presidential Agent and Intermediary for his brother" and was an "indispensable partner" in its successful resolution. In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas; Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency. Johnson retained almost all prominent Kennedy advisors, including Robert as attorney general. Robert was deeply affected by his brother's assassination. Despite his political differences with Johnson, he remained in the cabinet.

In 1964, polls showed that various Democrats wanted Kennedy to be Johnson's running mate in the presidential election. Kennedy instead organized his senatorial campaign in New York, challenging Kenneth Keating, an incumbent Republican senator. During a campaign speech, Kennedy declared his support for Israel, stating that in the event of an attack, "we will stand by Israel and come to her assistance". He won the election; during his congressional career, he supported civil rights and opposed Johnson's policies during the Vietnam War.

The 1968 presidential campaign has been referred to as one of the most volatile campaigns in American history; there was opposition to the ongoing Vietnam War. It also was a period of social unrest with riots in major cities. Allard K. Lowenstein's ''Newsnight'' program presented research by filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers were present on the night of the assassination. The three men who appear in films and photographs from the night of the assassination were identified by former colleagues and associates as former senior CIA officers who had worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's anti-Castro station based in Miami. They were JMWAVE Chief of Operations David Morales, Chief of Maritime Operations Gordon Campbell, and Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations George Joannides. Several people who had known Morales were sure that he was not the man claimed by O'Sullivan. After O'Sullivan published his book, assassination researchers Jefferson Morley and David Talbot also discovered that Campbell had died of a heart attack in 1962, six years before Kennedy's assassination. In response, O'Sullivan stated that the man on the video may have used Campbell's name as an alias.

Second gunman hypothesis

The location of Kennedy's wounds suggested that his assailant had stood behind him, while some witnesses assert that Sirhan faced west as Kennedy moved through the pantry. This has led to the suggestion that a second gunman fired the fatal shot, a possibility supported by Thomas Noguchi, the Chief Medical Examiner and Coroner for the County of Los Angeles, who stated that the fatal shot was behind Kennedy's right ear and had been fired at a distance of approximately to . Other witnesses said that Kennedy was turning to his left shaking hands as Sirhan approached, from the east.

In 1975, during a re-examination of the case, experts looked into the possibility of a second gunman, and concluded that there was little or no evidence to support this hypothesis. In 2004, CNN's senior writer Brad Johnson discovered a recording of Kennedy's victory speech, recorded by the Polish journalist . Johnson gave the tapes to the audio engineer Philip Van Praag, who analyzed and found 13 shots fired even though Sirhan's gun held only eight rounds. He also stated the recording revealed at least two cases where the timing between shots was shorter than physically possible from Sirhan's gun alone. Forensic audio specialists Wes Dooley and Paul Pegas of Audio Engineering Associates in Pasadena examined the findings and corroborated the presence of at least 10 shots on the tape along with an over-lapping shot. Other acoustic experts have claimed that they could find no more than eight shots recorded on the audiotape. Critics claim that Van Praag misidentified the noise impulses of the recording as gun shots.

In 2008, eyewitness John Pilger asserted his belief that there must have been a second gunman.

Legacy

Kennedy's assassination was one of the four major assassinations in the 1960s, including John F. Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1968). Some scholars view the assassination as one of the first major incidents of political violence in the United States stemming from the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East.

Until 1987, the LAPD retained the original files, reports, transcripts, fragments of the bullets that struck Kennedy and the four other bystanders in the kitchen pantry, the .22 caliber Iver-Johnson handgun used by Sirhan, Kennedy's blood-stained clothes, and other artifacts related to the assassination. In 1987, the LAPD donated the entire evidence collection (except for Kennedy's clothes) to the California State Archives in Sacramento for permanent preservation. Kennedy's blood-stained shirt, tie, and jacket are in the possession of the Los Angeles County District Attorney. In 2010, a controversy occurred when Kennedy's clothing was transported to the California Homicide Investigators Association conference in Las Vegas, where they were included in a temporary public display. Max Kennedy called it a "cheap bid for attention." The items and Kennedy's clothing were removed from the exhibit, with the LAPD apologizing to the Kennedy family.

The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Archives of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth contains a large collection of materials on the assassination. In 2006, American filmmaker Emilio Estevez wrote and directed the film ''Bobby''. He attempted to recreate the scene of the assassination through a fictional account. According to the author Ron Briley, "the history in ''Bobby'' is often misleading".

See also

* Kennedy curse
* List of assassinated American politicians

References

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External links

List of physical evidences at the assassination site
— via the California State Archives

Robert F. Kennedy Assassination 50th Anniversary
— via C-SPAN

Public Law 90-331
— via Govinfo.gov

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kennedy, Robert F., assassination of

1968 murders in the United States
Assassinations in the United States
Filmed assassinations
1968 United States presidential election
Terrorist incidents in Los Angeles
Deaths by firearm in California
Deaths by person in Los Angeles
Murder in Los Angeles
June 1968 events in the United States
1968 in Los Angeles
Terrorist incidents in the United States in 1968
Political violence in the United States