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Publication Spotlight: American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Participating in the political destiny of our nation

Reviewed by Alan Dale | 9 January, 2020

There are moments when complementary facets of our lives come together and find expression in the form of a favorite song, a movie, a particular book. I’m referring to what we’ve all experienced when the right something comes along at the right time. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s deeply personal memoir, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family is, for me, such a book.

American Values is an authoritative introduction to America’s preeminent political family. It offers candid revelations from the perspective of our guide who lives the meaning of his family’s name, and it conveys, directly and convincingly, how one may choose to respond to the complex forms of adversity befalling our nation and our world. It also informs us quite a lot about the way real power is exercised in the modern world and the formidable forces against which John and Robert Kennedy were pitted during the 1960s. Ultimately, we are allowed to accompany the author as he courageously follows a path of illumination while exploring the dark places and true circumstances by which his family’s influence and much of the world’s hope was disrupted by gunfire.

Beginning with Chapter One, “Grandpa,” readers of a certain age will be challenged to rethink whatever they have accepted as probably true about the people whose lives and careers are relevant to the telling of this story. Younger readers, who come to this work as an introduction, without having to divest themselves from decades of character assassination, mythology and misrepresentation, will benefit from this portrait of the author’s patriarchal grandfather, Joseph Patrick Kennedy whose “integrity and horse sense” established foundational principles which would be passed down through successive Kennedy generations. Readers young and old may be startled by the author’s brief but informative remedial history lesson as he examines important dynamics of social and political power structures of the 1920s and ’30s through which his grandparents lived and which stand as starkly relevant to understanding much of what confronts us today.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Waterkeeper Alliance, author of American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family

Recollections of youthful encounters with colossal figures such as LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, memorable conversational sketches of Allen Dulles and others by Kennedy family friends and relatives, all kinds of interesting observations, amusing anecdotes and perceptions abound across many pages, but astute readers will recognize very early on, there’s more being offered than charming reminiscences. It is the backdrop, the context against which the array of privileged experiences being presented is told that distinguishes this narrative as particularly informed and noteworthy. RFK, Jr. has committed himself to examining various manifestations of the national security state as it responded, adversely, to President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy and the reforms which they sought to ensure that our children’s children would be born into a world where reasonable men would value peace over war, justice over inequality, opportunity over exclusion, and freedom over the many different forms of tyranny and enslavement.

There is great joy and much color throughout this reading experience. There’s also the inevitable poignancy and heartbreak that we know. Above all, there is the ineluctable presence of unconditional love. Three people who receive special attention by the author are Lem Billings, Ena Bernard, and Ethel Kennedy. Their stories, and the very personal manner by which their stories are told, are among the most affecting of all that the author has shared.

American Values is an inspiring journey through one man’s life whose story is an astounding record of the people and events that shaped our nation during a period of unprecedented danger and opportunity. It is also an affirmation of all that we may see as what is best about our collective efforts as a nation, our collective aspirations to determine our destiny through the work of our own hands, to persevere through cruelties and obstacles, addictions, disappointment and profound loss, battling against complacency, facing our fears, while maintaining our faith, our conviction, and our willingness to dream things that never were, and say, “Why not?”

Five stars. Highest recommendation.

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RFK’s Secret Role in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Recently declassified information shows the critical part JFK’s younger brother played in resolving the Cold War’s most dangerous moment

By Matthew Hayes on August 6, 2019

RFK's Secret Role in the Cuban Missile Crisis — Credit: Bill Eppridge *Getty Images*

‘This is the result of the photography taken Sunday, sir. There’s a medium-range ballistic missile launch site and two new military encampments … in West Central Cuba. The launch site at one of the encampments contains a total of at least 14 canvas-covered missile trailers, measuring 67 feet long and more than nine feet in width.”

On a Tuesday morning in October 1962, these chilling words informed President Kennedy and his advisors that the Soviet Union was constructing nuclear missile sites in Cuba. Thanks to recording devices established and activated by JFK, we can actually hear CIA briefer Marshall Carter and deliver this precise analysis of U.S. spy plane photos. Their tone appears calm and measured, yet this briefing would light the touch paper for the Cold War’s most dramatic crisis. Nuclear missiles now lay in place merely 90 miles off the U.S. coast, contrary to the express assurances of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and in the face of repeated warnings from President Kennedy in preceding months.

These missiles presented a dramatic challenge to the precarious balance of Cold War power, and the next 13 days would see a dangerous stand-off between two nuclear superpowers with a combined arsenal of some 4,000 warheads. Before the crisis was resolved, one of these warheads would be ordered for launch.

Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother, was 36 years old at the time. One of the youngest attorneys general ever appointed, RFK was also the president’s de facto chief of staff and most trusted advisor. Known as “that terrier of a man” by some in the Kennedy administration, RFK was profoundly committed to his brother’s success. On the campaign trail for his brother years earlier he had remarked, “I don’t care if anyone likes me, so long as they like Jack.” He carried this temperament through to the president’s administration, doggedly pursuing his brother’s objectives, ever ready to cut through departmental etiquette to ask forceful questions and to challenge the answers.

By October 1962, he had already proved himself indispensable to the president. It was to his younger brother that the president had turned after a botched invasion of Cuba in 1961 (the Bay of Pigs fiasco), appointing him head of a task force examining the causes of the disaster. A year later, it was no surprise that RFK was one of the first to be notified of the missiles, receiving an urgent phone call from the president a few hours ahead of the CIA briefing.

In the coming days and weeks RFK would make a unique and indispensable set of contributions to resolving the crisis. We are now able to follow these contributions in rich detail, thanks to the remarkable in-the-room access provided by the White House tape recordings, as well as new archival sources recently declassified.

First, RFK went after the raw data. His personal files on the crisis hold as many as 3,584 documents directly reviewed by him over the period. Immediately after hanging up the phone to his brother, he coordinated a private briefing with the CIA. Joining cabinet discussions later that morning, RFK was already extremely well-briefed on the missile sites, their disposition and readiness.

Such preparation was an RFK trademark, especially where it required out-of-the-box thinking. In his private notes on the Bay of Pigs disaster, RFK had judged “underestimation” of Castro’s forces as a key failing of the Kennedy administration. Determined not to repeat the mistake, RFK was one of only two presidential advisors to predict the installation of missile sites in Cuba, warning his brother of the possibility over a year before the crisis.

He then took active measures to prepare for the possibility, instructing the Departments of State and Defense to investigate possible responses, whilst also outlining his own proposals in interdepartmental security briefings. These proposals were remarkably prescient of those actually debated and subsequently chosen during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a direct result of RFK’s proactive, terrier-like energy, the key government departments tasked with handling the Cuban missile crisis had been remarkably well-prepared in contingency thinking and intelligence.

Perhaps even more importantly, so had the president’s closest advisor. As the crisis developed, RFK continued to seek new information and advice, acting as his brother’s eyes and ears—able to go where he could not, to source frank perspectives unhindered by presidential deference. At times this meant spotlighting another advisor’s counsel in a cabinet meeting; at others summarizing a loud mess of opinions into a coherent range of actionable options for the president.

In a few unique circumstances, it even meant playing up a blunter edge to his persona, asking the sort of direct questions the president could not. In one remarkable exchange during the crisis, apparent in the tapes, the president can actually be heard whispering instructions to RFK on a difficult question he wanted put to the head of the CIA. RFK also held a number of pivotal one-on-one conversations with fellow advisors during the crisis, privately relaying these back to the president in a number of off-the-record discussions.

Indeed, we know, from diary entries, references in official memoranda and the tapes themselves, that RFK met privately with the president throughout the crisis. These were frank one-on-ones that gave the president an opportunity to talk through options freely, and RFK the chance to bring new information and advice to the president outside of busy group meetings. As Kenneth O”Donnell, JFK’s special assistant at the time, would later remark, “Bobby could always reach him.” On one evening at the height of the crisis, the two brothers even discussed JFK’s possible impeachment.

In the first days of the crisis, whilst other presidential advisors were still processing the shocking news, RFK jumped far ahead, coldly calculating and interrogating the possible U.S. response. He insisted that an invasion remain on the table, and even pushed for a reduction in the lead time required to initiate one. Until recently this approach was held up as evidence for a belligerent, hawkish advisor, promoting the sort of military action that would have led to dangerous escalation.

Yet declassified private notes, and a closer understanding of the brother’s intimate relationship, now support a more holistic view of RFK. He saw his role as pressing for all alternatives, regardless of where they might lead. In the words of McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor at the time, RFK’s function was “to go and prod and poke people into doing their best, and staying with the problem, and not giving up until we got a better answer.” RFK would subsequently put his weight behind the famous blockade plan, a naval quarantine of Cuba designed to pressure the Soviets to remove the missiles.

CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE AT SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Did L.A. police and prosecutors bungle the Bobby Kennedy assassination probe?

by Tom Jackman June 5 at 5:00 AM

Paul Schrade, who was hit by one of the bullets fired during the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, holds a news conference in his Los Angeles hospital room five days after the June 1968 shooting. Beginning in 1974, Schrade launched a campaign to reinvestigate the case, which he continues to do at age 93. (AP)

LOS ANGELES — For six years after he was shot and wounded while walking behind Robert F. Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968, Paul Schrade mourned the loss of his friend and stayed out of the public eye. But beginning with a news conference in 1974, Schrade has demanded answers to the question of whether a second gunman — and not Sirhan Sirhan — killed Kennedy.

Soon after Sirhan’s trial ended with his first-degree-murder conviction in April 1969, journalists noted that Kennedy had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, but witnesses all said Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy. Bullet holes found in the doors of the crime scene indicated more shots were fired than could have come from Sirhan’s eight-shot .22-caliber pistol, some witnesses said. Sirhan’s defense team had not challenged any of the physical evidence at trial.

[‘A train to the end of an era’: Reflecting on RFK’s 200-mile funeral procession]

Fifty years after the assassination, Schrade is still pushing for a new investigation.” I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman,” Schrade said. “The truth is not known yet about who killed Robert Kennedy.” Schrade, now 93, believes Sirhan wounded him and four other people but did not fire the fatal shot into Kennedy.

Schrade has been supported in his calls for a new investigation into the case by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who met with Sirhan in prison last December and told The Washington Post that “the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.” Now Robert Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has joined Schrade and her brother.

[Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan]

“Bobby makes a compelling case,” the former Maryland lieutenant governor told The Post. “I think it should be reopened.”

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend speaks to members of the media in 2016 at an event in Boston announcing the naming of a Navy ship in honor of her father, Robert F. Kennedy. Townsend says she thinks the investigation into her father’s assassination should be reopened. (Paul Marotta)

Three other Kennedy children — former Congressman Joe Kennedy, activist Kerry Kennedy and filmmaker Rory Kennedy — have said they do not think the case should be reopened. Ethel Kennedy, the senator’s widow and now 90, has not commented.

Schrade and a host of authors and researchers point to a number of apparent missteps by the Los Angeles police and prosecutors in focusing solely on Sirhan, while suppressing evidence of a second shooter, such as:

• Prosecutors withheld the autopsy report from Sirhan’s defense lawyers until six weeks into the trial, showing that Kennedy had been shot at point-blank range from behind. Five other people in the hotel pantry standing behind Kennedy, including Schrade, were hit by bullets fired from in front of them.

• Police failed to investigate an armed private-security guard who was walking behind Kennedy at precisely the angle where the fatal shots to Kennedy’s head and back were fired. He has consistently denied firing his weapon but has told conflicting stories over the years.

• Police officers and FBI agents identified apparent bullet holes in two door frames of the pantry, indicating more than eight shots were fired. But no evidence of those holes was presented at trial, and the Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames shortly after the trial.

• The lead crime-scene investigator testified at trial that bullets from the wounded victims matched a bullet from Kennedy, but presented no photos or evidence to support that. When two ballistics experts examined the bullets after the trial, they found the bullets didn’t match. Subsequent investigations couldn’t match any of the bullets to Sirhan’s gun. The crime-scene investigator was subsequently criticized even by prosecutors for sloppy work in the case, by a judge for seeming perjury in another high-profile murder, and later suspended by his own police chief.

• Los Angeles police bullied or ignored witnesses whose stories did not match the lone gunman scenario, records show, particularly people who claimed they saw Sirhan with a dark-haired woman in a white polka-dot dress. Then at trial, prosecutors brought in a blonde-haired woman with a green polka-dot dress and claimed she was the mysterious woman in question. Sirhan’s lawyers, focusing on a mental health defense, did not challenge that, either.

Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger, seated in the light jacket, introduces his prosecution team for the murder trial of Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. In the back row from left, deputy district attorneys Lynn D. Compton, John E. Howard and David N. Fitts tried the case. (George Brich/AP)

The Los Angeles police have heard all this criticism before, did some reinvestigation in the 1970s that confirmed their own work, and now consider the case closed. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office referred inquiries to the California attorney general’s office, which repeatedly defeated Sirhan’s appeals, and which declined to respond beyond court filings. The California and federal courts have consistently held that Sirhan was guilty of murder, even with new discoveries made in the decades after the early morning of June 5, 1968.

“Considering all of the evidence,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich wrote in 2013, “old and new, incriminatory and exculpatory, admissible and inadmissible, the Court cannot say that it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found [Sirhan] guilty of the assassination of Senator Kennedy beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Lisa Pease, author of a forthcoming book on the investigation’s failures, said: “In ignoring the myriad evidence of conspiracy in this case, the LAPD and DA’s office created the seventh pantry victim: the truth. We have a guy in prison, provably by the evidence, for a crime he didn’t commit.”

There are facts that are not in dispute, namely that Sirhan had a .22-caliber pistol in the hotel pantry on June 5, 1968, and that he emptied all eight shots as Kennedy stood in front of him. Two Ambassador Hotel employees, Karl Uecker and Edward Minasian, said repeatedly that Uecker grabbed Sirhan’s wrist after two shots, slammed it to a table, and that Sirhan continued to fire wildly while being held down but never got close to Kennedy.

Sirhan Sirhan, right, being escorted to court by attorney Russell E. Parsons in June 1968 to face charges in the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The defense team did not challenge the police investigation, in part leading to Sirhan’s first-degree-murder conviction. (AP)

“I have told police and testified [to the grand jury],” Uecker said in a 1975 affidavit, “that there was a distance of at least one and one-half feet between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. … There is no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. … Sirhan never got close enough to a point-blank shot, never.”

But at trial, neither prosecutors nor Sirhan’s defense team focused on the distance between Kennedy and Sirhan. Though Sirhan and prosecutors reached a plea deal in January 1969 for Sirhan to admit guilt and receive a life sentence — a deal the judge rejected — and trial began on Jan. 7, records show prosecutors did not provide coroner Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report until about Feb. 22. By that time, the defense had already decided to concede that Sirhan had shot Kennedy and was trying simply to avoid the death penalty by claiming he was mentally ill.

Noguchi found that four shots had been fired at Kennedy from at most three inches away. Three shots appeared to be in contact with Kennedy’s back and shoulder, based on powder burns to his jacket, Noguchi said, with one shot passing through the jacket’s shoulder pad and not touching Kennedy. All three were fired sharply upward. The fourth shot was fired into the back of Kennedy’s head from three inches away, Noguchi concluded, by test-firing a similar gun to determine how much gunpowder sprayed at various distances.

“Thus I have never said,” Noguchi wrote in his autobiography, “that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.” At a conference last month of RFK assassination authors, Pittsburgh coroner Cyril Wecht pressed Noguchi as to whether there was a second gunman, but the 91-year-old pathologist said, “That’s not my duty.” He also told Wecht that defense attorneys never spoke with him before the trial and did not ask him about the muzzle distance at trial.

Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi in 1970. His autopsy of Robert F. Kennedy revealed that the senator was shot from the back, but the report was not provided to Sirhan’s lawyers until six weeks into the trial. (George Brich/AP)

Prosecutors and some authors have theorized that Kennedy turned and raised his arm as the shots began, thus enabling Sirhan to hit him in the back. The government notes that the jury heard the evidence, convicted Sirhan and sentenced him to death, which was later commuted to a life term. But there was plenty of evidence the jury never heard. An appeal Sirhan’s current lawyers have pending to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says Sirhan suffered from ineffective assistance from his legal team.

[‘That stain of bloodshed’: After King’s assassination, RFK calmed an angry crowd with an unforgettable speech]

The defense attorneys also went lightly on Los Angeles police criminalist DeWayne Wolfer, who oversaw the crime-scene investigation. He and Noguchi were both photographed pointing to bullet holes in the pantry, and police removed those door frames. Numerous witnesses, including police officers and FBI agents, said the holes were made by bullets. But between the bullets which hit Kennedy and those which hit Schrade and four others, all the bullets from Sirhan’s gun had been accounted for by Wolfer.

“I’ve inspected quite a few crime scenes in my day,” FBI Special Agent William Bailey told authors William Klaber and Philip Melanson for their book, “Shadow Play: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy.” “These were clearly bullet holes; the wood around them was freshly broken away and I could see the base of a bullet in each one.” Many other people saw these holes, reports show.

In 1992, former LAPD organized crime Detective Mike Rothmiller filed an affidavit saying he had reviewed an internal intelligence report about the assassination which “listed a total of ten different bullets that had been recovered from the scene of the assassination and victims.” Rothmiller knew Sirhan’s gun held eight bullets. The report was never disclosed to Sirhan’s lawyers.

Two police officers inspect an apparent bullet hole discovered in a door frame in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded on June 5, 1968. The photographer’s caption noted, “Bullet is still in the wood.” Police concluded it wasn’t a bullet. (Dick Strobel/AP)

Wolfer concluded that the holes in the pantry had been made previously through hotel wear and tear, not bullets, though Uecker and other employees said the holes were not there before. The issue was not explored at trial, and when an article appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press shortly after the trial ended questioning the four holes, Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames, records show. The police said there was no room to hold the frames and they were not needed after the conviction, though Sirhan’s appeal was pending. Ceiling tiles with apparent bullet holes in them, removed from directly above the shooting area and also not introduced at trial, were destroyed by the police, too.

Crucially, Wolfer testified that a bullet removed from Kennedy’s neck and a bullet removed from a wounded victim had come from Sirhan’s gun. But he did not submit any photos comparing the two bullets or keep any notes documenting his comparison, and the defense accepted his testimony without challenge. In 1970, when ballistics expert William Harper examined the bullets with a newly invented comparison camera, he found the bullets had not been fired from the same gun.

Soon two other ballistics experts also said the two bullets came from different guns. In 1975, a commission of seven experts was empaneled to review the ballistics, including refiring Sirhan’s gun. But Sirhan’s gun had deteriorated, and it couldn’t be determined whether it had fired either the Kennedy bullet or the wounded victim’s bullet. Later, it was determined that the bullet police submitted for the 1975 test as the Kennedy bullet was from another victim, not Kennedy.

If police had followed a trail of bullets from behind Kennedy’s right side, the person who was standing closest to him was an armed private-security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar said he fell down as the shooting began, then pulled his .38-caliber gun but didn’t fire because Sirhan had already been captured. A news assistant for a local TV station, Don Schulman, gave a radio interview moments after the shooting and described Cesar firing back at Sirhan.

Sirhan Sirhan, third from left in blue, is prevented from shaking the hand of Paul Schrade, near the camera, at the end of a parole hearing in 2016. Schrade apologized to Sirhan for not coming forward sooner. Sirhan was denied parole for the 15th time. Schrade believes Sirhan shot him and four others but not Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. (AP/Gregory Bull)

But Los Angeles police did not check Cesar’s gun, records show. When he showed them a .22-caliber revolver similar to Sirhan’s, the police didn’t check that gun either. Cesar was never a suspect for the police and always maintained his innocence. Prosecutors never called him as a witness, even though he was one of those standing closest to Kennedy. Journalist Dan Moldea hired a top polygraph examiner to question Cesar in 1994, and Moldea said Cesar was found truthful. He lives today in the Philippines. His .22-caliber revolver has been found but never tested for comparison to the Kennedy bullet.

Another angle the police were disinclined to follow was the “girl in the polka-dot dress.” Numerous people in the pantry spotted her standing with Sirhan, consistently describing her as “shapely” or “proportionate,” in a white dress with black dots. Most notable of these witnesses was Sandra Serrano, who gave an interview to NBC’s Sander Vanocur an hour after the shooting describing the woman, and a man, running out of the hotel saying, “We shot Kennedy.” But records show an aggressive and demeaning polygraph interview given by an LAPD examiner caused Serrano to change her story. [“Nobody told you ‘We have shot Kennedy,'” Lt. Enrique Hernandez told Serrano, recordings show. “Sandy, you know that this is wrong . . . This didn’t happen.”] Serrano later returned to her original story. John Fahey, a man who spoke to police during their investigation, had said he spent the day of the election with a woman in a polka-dot dress who told him, “They’re gonna take care of Kennedy tonight.” But police interrogators told him, “These answers will have to be changed,” and eventually Fahey equivocated and his account was dismissed, according to Shane O’Sullivan’s book “Who Killed Bobby?”.

An older couple told Sgt. Paul Sharaga about the man and the woman in the polka-dot dress and also heard the “We shot Kennedy” remark. Sharaga broadcast a lookout for the pair, only to have it canceled 90 minutes later. Recordings show that an LAPD inspector told Sharaga over the radio that one man was in custody, and police “don’t want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy.”

Twenty years later, when the case records were released, Sharaga said the LAPD report on his action was “phony,” because it said the couple reported the girl saying, “They shot Kennedy” instead of “We shot Kennedy.” Sharaga told author William Klaber: “This is just how things were done. If they couldn’t get you to change your story, they’d ignore you. If they couldn’t ignore you, they’d discredit you, and if they couldn’t do that, they’d just make something up.”

The burial of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery on June 8, 1968. (AP)

The assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy?

by Tom Jackman June 4 at 12:20 PM

Sirhan Sirhan is led away from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. Some believe Sirhan was hypnotized to be present as a distraction from a second gunman. (Bettman/Getty)

Even as Sirhan Sirhan was being captured, seconds after the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, he behaved oddly. A group of men had tackled him, held him down and tried to wrest the gun out of his hands. But “in the middle of a hurricane of sound and feeling,” wrote one of those men, author George Plimpton, Sirhan “seemed peaceful.” Plimpton was struck by Sirhan’s “dark brown and enormously peaceful eyes.” A Los Angeles police officer who had rushed in recalled, “He had a blank, glassed-over look on his face — like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind.”

At the same time, the short, slim Sirhan — 5 feet 5 inches, about 120 pounds — exerted superhuman strength as one man held his wrist to a steam table in the Ambassador Hotel pantry, firing off five or six more shots even as he was held around the neck, body and legs by other men, witnesses said. It took a half-dozen men to wrench the .22-caliber pistol out of Sirhan’s grip.

At the police station, Sirhan was preternaturally calm, officers later said. “I was impressed by Sirhan’s composure and relaxation,” Sgt. William Jordan wrote in a report later that morning. “He appeared less upset to me than individuals arrested for a traffic violation.”

Sirhan’s behavior, combined with his consistent claim that he remembers everything about June 5, 1968, except the moment of the shooting, led some people to suspect that Sirhan was under hypnosis when he fired at Kennedy. His defense team explored that angle before his trial, finding that he was easily hypnotized and could be induced to do things without knowing why, such as climb the bars of his cell. The lawyers chose to use a diminished mental capacity defense instead.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy speaks to campaign workers at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. After making a short speech, Kennedy was fatally shot in an adjacent pantry. (AP)

But the hypnosis angle gained momentum in recent years after Sirhan was examined for more than 60 hours by a Harvard Medical School professor with vast expertise in forensic psychiatry and hypnosis. In a lengthy affidavit filed with Sirhan’s last appeal in 2011, Daniel P. Brown concluded that “Mr. Sirhan did not act under his own volition and knowledge at the time of the assassination and is not responsible for actions coerced and/or carried out by others.” He was, Brown said, a true “Manchurian Candidate,” hypno-programmed into carrying out a violent political act without knowing it.

[Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan.]

“I have written four textbooks on hypnosis,” Brown wrote, “and have hypnotized over 6,000 individuals over a 40-year professional career. Mr. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I have ever met, and the magnitude of his amnesia for actions under hypnosis is extreme.” Brown said he has spent another 60 hours with Sirhan in the years since his 2011 affidavit, further confirming his conclusions.

Brown researched not only Sirhan’s background but also the details of the case, and wove together the CIA’s notorious “MKUltra” mind-control experiments of the 1950s and 1960s; the Mafia; the famed “girl in the polka-dot dress” seen with Sirhan before the shooting; and an unknown “Radio Man” who secretly directed Sirhan to write the incriminating “RFK must die!” statements in a notebook found in his bedroom.

[From 1977: CIA papers detail secret experiments on behavior control]

To some, including Sirhan’s current lawyers, Brown’s theory explains why a mild-mannered Palestinian immigrant with no criminal history suddenly showed up at a hotel and shot one of the United States’ leading political lights. To others, it’s reflective of the United States’ thirst for conspiracies, for a belief in a larger, more complex narrative to explain a cataclysmic tragedy, when a simple plotline will suffice.

Lawyers for Sirhan are currently using the theory that he was a hypnotized distraction for the actual killer of Kennedy in a pending appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Although it would have no binding power over the case, a positive finding could be used to push California authorities to reopen the case. Sirhan attorney William Pepper said he’s convinced that someone used “both drugs and hypnosis to make him a totally compliant distraction at the time Bobby Kennedy was within range of the second shooter, who was able to get down behind him.” Kennedy’s fatal wound was fired at point-blank range from behind, while witnesses said Sirhan was in front of him.

But to the U.S. court system, that claim simply didn’t fly. In rejecting Sirhan’s final federal appeal in 2013, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich wrote that Sirhan’s “theory that he was subject to mind control may be intriguing” but that the experts’ views “fall far short of demonstrating that [Sirhan] actually was subjected to mind control.” Wistrich added that “Brown’s retrospective opinion based upon tests assessing [Sirhan’s] mental condition forty years after the fact are of negligible weight.”

Prosecutors noted that many psychological experts believe that a person cannot be hypnotized to do something against their will. But others disagree, and some believe that Sirhan may have been programmed to think he was shooting at a target range, rather than at a human target.

Daniel P. Brown, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, interviewed Sirhan Sirhan for more than 60 hours and said he believes he was hypnotized and manipulated into being present at the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. (Alex Prideaux)

Alan Scheflin, an expert on mind and behavior control and a former law and philosophy professor at Georgetown University, said that “the word hypnosis, like mind control and brainwashing, has a public stigma.” People are skeptical of what can appear like a magician’s trick, he said.

But Scheflin examined the CIA’s mind experiments in detail in his book “The Mind Manipulators” and found that the agency did have a project designed to create hypnotized subjects “for purposes of assassination.” And, Scheflin said, “the CIA experiments showed that was possible. Hypnotized people were ordered to do things they otherwise would not do, such as rip up a Bible or fire a gun at somebody they otherwise wouldn’t. In every instance, they got the results.”

Sirhan had a fascination with hypnosis before the assassination but said he could not remember anyone hypnotizing him to perform devious acts. In recordings of his conversations with defense lawyers and psychiatrists in 1968, released by authors Robert Blair Kaiser and William Klaber, he expresses bafflement that he shot Kennedy but realizes he was captured at the scene with a gun. He also doesn’t recall writing in notebooks, repeatedly, that “RFK Must Die!,” though he acknowledges it appears to be his handwriting.

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Sirhan told one psychiatrist. “If I had wanted to kill a man, why would I have shot him right there where they could have choked the … out of me.” He also noted that he was a Christian and that “my own conscience doesn’t agree with what I did. It’s against my upbringing. … ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Life is the thing, you know. Where would you be if you didn’t have life? And here I go and splatter this guy’s brains. It’s just not me.”

Mel Ayton, author of “The Forgotten Terrorist,” about Sirhan, said, “The evidence presented during the 1969 trial revealed how Sirhan was fully aware of everything around him on the night he killed Robert Kennedy and that no credible evidence has ever been discovered that would indicate Sirhan’s actions were the product of a hypnotized mind.” He said Sirhan’s previous knowledge of hypnosis enabled him to construct a story that featured convenient memory loss about the shooting and his notebooks.

“Ignoring Sirhan’s numerous lies that he told his lawyers and writer Robert Blair Kaiser,” Ayton said, “conspiracists prefer instead to take Sirhan at his word.”

Sirhan Sirhan at a parole hearing in 2016 in San Diego, where he was denied parole for the 15th time in the slaying of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. (Gregory Bull/Pool/AP)

Brown remains adamant that Sirhan was a victim of a larger scheme, put in place as a distraction while a second gunman fired the fatal shots to Kennedy. And in his four-hour interviews with Sirhan between 2008 and 2010, Brown said Sirhan would suddenly switch into “a military-like alter personality state,” which he called “range mode,” for recalling times when he was shooting at a firing range.

But who would have programmed Sirhan Sirhan in such a way that he would be present at the Ambassador Hotel when Kennedy was giving his victory speech after the California primary, and who would have supplied a second gunman to perform the killing? Brown developed a theory inspired by the real-life shenanigans of the CIA.

Beginning in 1949, as the Cold War was heating up, the CIA under Allen Dulles launched a project called “Bluebird,” later called “Artichoke” and then “Project MKUltra,” a series of experiments on unwitting people to see if their minds could be manipulated by drugs, torture or hypnosis. Colleges, hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies participated in the project, records revealed in the 1970s showed, with the CIA hoping to be able to manipulate foreign leaders and other important figures, or program others to commit acts of espionage. In Canada, some subjects were kidnapped off the street, and in the United States, some people died of drug overdoses, the CIA later admitted. LSD was administered to some subjects, and professors at Stanford and UCLA participated in MKUltra, records show.

[Lengthy mind control research by CIA is detailed]

In 1966, Sirhan Sirhan was 22 years old and living in Pasadena, Calif., with his mother and brothers. He was not particularly political or ambitious, his family has said. He was traumatized by the death of his sister from leukemia, Brown said in an interview, and turned to hypnosis as a way to explore life after death. He worked at the Santa Anita horse track as a stable boy, walking but not riding horses, hoping to become a jockey. Sirhan also dabbled in shortwave radio and had a set in his room at home.

Brown found that Sirhan was recruited by the operator of a private ranch for thoroughbreds to ride horses there, even though Sirhan had little experience riding. Before long, Sirhan had suffered a couple of falls that required hospitalization. His family reported that after those incidents, Sirhan seemed to have changed.

But after interviewing Sirhan, Brown believes that Sirhan was drugged and taken to a secret location for mind-control experiments such as those performed under the CIA’s auspices. Sirhan and his family both reported that he was gone for two weeks after one of the falls, though Brown said hospital records showed he was released after one day. Sirhan told Brown he was held in a room with bars on the windows and recalled being disoriented and floating in and out of consciousness, sleeping frequently.

“Mr. Sirhan doesn’t describe typical post-concussive symptoms,” Brown wrote in 2011, “but rather symptoms consistent with drug intoxication. … Sirhan’s spotty memory gives the impression of someone who was drugged, treated for superficial wounds at the emergency room, and then possibly taken to a special, experimental unit where his and other patients’ responses to drug and hypnotic programming were observed.”

Brown said that the ranch operator had ties to the mafia and that the mafia in turn had links to the CIA from their work together attempting to kill Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Then, in Pasadena, Sirhan met “Radio Man,” a man who shared Sirhan’s interest in shortwave radios. Brown believes Radio Man used “waking coercive persuasion” and “possibly hypnosis” to control Sirhan. Brown wrote that the “statements about killing RFK written in Mr. Sirhan’s spiral notebooks,” which Sirhan did not remember writing, “were written by Mr. Sirhan in a hypnotic state and while communicating with a third party over his shortwave radio, and thus were coercively and involuntarily induced.”

Over the next two years, Sirhan began visiting a firing range not far from the ranch, sometimes with guidance from Radio Man on how to shoot targets, Brown said. He spent hours at the range on the day of the killing. Brown said much of what Sirhan recalled in their conversations was independently confirmed.

On the night of the assassination, Sirhan has described going to the Ambassador to attend a different political victory party, drinking too much and returning to his car. Not feeling well enough to drive, he reportedly returned to the hotel looking for coffee, and an attractive woman in a polka-dot dress led him to a coffee urn near the pantry of the hotel, and then into the pantry. Sirhan has said he remembers gazing at the attractive woman, who was noticed by many other witnesses in the pantry, and the next thing he remembers is being pummeled by the men who captured him.

In an adaptation from their new book, “The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy,” authors Tim Tate and Brad Johnson say they believe they identified the woman in the polka-dot dress as Elayn Neal and that her husband claimed to have worked for the CIA in mind-control experiments. Neal died in 2012, the husband years earlier. Author Shane O’Sullivan reported the same details in the reissue of his book, “Who Killed Bobby?,” and noted Neal did not marry the alleged CIA man until 1973.

Johnson said he learned additional details about Neal after the deadline for his book. He said a reliable source reported that Neal and her husband actually met in 1967 and, by June 1968, appeared to be having an affair. Neal’s own first marriage ended in October 1968.

If someone was controlling Sirhan, how did they get him to the Ambassador at the right place and time? Brown said he believes Radio Man could have signaled Sirhan to return to the hotel with the gun, as the CIA mind-control project was experimenting with such commands.

In the pantry, Sirhan told Brown, he was trying to think of a way of seducing the attractive woman in the polka-dot dress. “I think she had her hand on me,” Sirhan said. “Then I was at the target range. A flashback to the shooting range. … It was like I was at the range again. I think I shot one or two shots. Then I snapped out of it and thought, ‘I’m not at the range, then what is going on?’ Then they started grabbing me … later when I saw the female judge I knew that Bobby Kennedy was shot and I was the shooter, but it doesn’t come into my memory.”

Sirhan admitted at trial in 1969 that he killed Kennedy, though he said then he didn’t remember it. His defense team didn’t learn until midway through the trial that Kennedy’s fatal shots had been from behind. He was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence. For years, Sirhan was skeptical of the hypnosis claim, and he did not respond to The Washington Post’s questions about it. In 1994, he told journalist Dan Moldea, “It’s probably too diabolical to suggest that I was controlled by someone else — but I don’t know. I only know that I don’t remember anything about the shooting.”

Brown wrote that Sirhan entering “range mode” in the pantry “suggests that his action of firing the gun was neither under his voluntary control nor done with conscious knowledge, and is likely a product of automatic post-hypnotic behavior and coercive control.”

California attorneys general argued that “Brown’s conclusions are clearly speculative and necessarily depend on the veracity of [Sirhan’s] story,” and that “Brown completely ignored the vast amount of evidence presented at trial, which contradicted [Sirhan’s] self-serving ‘recall’ of the events and proved that he intentionally killed Senator Kennedy.”

Wistrich, the judge, agreed. “Whether or not the theory that a person can be hypnotized to commit murder,” Wistrich wrote, “and then to lose his memory of committing that murder is scientifically credible … [Sirhan] has not provided any reliable evidence that this actually occurred.”

Note: This story has been updated with additional information about the “polka-dot dress girl.”