No one has had time to digest the 10,000-page file on the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968. But the documents seen thus far suggest that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the convicted assassin, hatched a plan to kill the senator.
Pages of a notebook show Sirhan repeatedly writing that Kennedy “must be killed” and “must be assassinated.” The Palestinian immigrant wrote that murdering the 42-year-old candidate was “becoming an obsession.”
And before Sirhan shot Kennedy to death in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he told a black man that he intended to do so.
Speaking of the release to the Daily Wire, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the documents don’t contain a “smoking gun” but do offer previously unknown facts.
Sirhan’s Rants
Sirhan originally pleaded not guilty. He then told the trial judge that he wanted to plead guilty and that he wished to be executed. The judge rejected Sirhan’s request, and he was convicted of killing Kennedy in April 1969 then sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life in prison after the California Supreme Court claimed that the death penalty violated the state constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The documents released today, again, include Sirhan’s rants in a spiral notebook.
“My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more and more of an unshakable obsession,” he wrote on May 18, 1968.
“R.F.K. must die,” he wrote:
RFK must be killed. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated. R.F.K. must be assassinated, R.F.K. must be assassinated. R.F.K. must be assassinated.… Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated assassinated assassinated assassinated.
Pages later, Sirhan wrote that “I advocate the overthrow of the current president of the f***en United States of America.”
“RFK must be disposed of like his brother was,” he wrote on a U.S. Treasury Department envelope.
The documents show that Sirhan’s plans to murder the father of 10 — who lived in the Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia, where John F. Kennedy had lived — weren’t just private musings. He told city trash collector Alvin Clark, who knew Sirhan because the latter’s home was on Clark’s route, what he planned to do.
“CLARK advised that sometime after the shooting of MARTIN LUTHER KING, SIRHAN SIRHAN told CLARK, a Negro, that he hated all the white people in this country and he wished he could do something real bad that would hurt them all,” the document dated December 4, 1968 says:
At this particular time, SIRHAN SIRHAN commented on CLARK wearing a KENNEDY political button and having a KENNEDY sticker on his truck. CLARK told SIRHAN SIRHAN that he was going to vote for Senator KENNEDY for President. SIRHAN SIRHAN … said “What are you voting for that son of a b**ch for?” CLARK replied that he liked Senator KENNEDY and was the only man who sincerely intended to help the black people of this country. At this time, SIRHAN SIRHAN turned away and said “Well, I don’t agree. I’m planning on shooting at son of a b**ch”. CLARK did not take SIRHAN SIRHAN seriously, and took his remark only as a mark of strong disfavor.
Gabbard — More to Come
Gabbard told the Daily Wire that the 10,000 released yesterday are just the beginning. The workers combing the documents found another batch of 50,000 that must be reviewed.
“Of course there are a lot of different theories and questions surrounding these assassinations,” Gabbard told the website:
People will find in the release today, there is no “smoking gun,” but there are a lot of things that have not been previously known that really call into question what really happened — and who was behind it, which includes conversations that were happening in other countries, and messages that were going around about the assassination itself.
The assassination itself, does indeed, invite observations about Sirhan and whether he was the assassin, despite the guilty verdict and his admission that he committed the crime.
RFK Jr.’s Theory
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of Health and Human Service, doesn’t believe Sirhan murdered the former attorney general. The forensic and ballistic evidence, Kennedy says, show that Sirhan couldn’t have done it. He thinks the CIA might have been involved, a corollary of his firm belief that the agency was behind the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.
During an interview 2023, when he was running for president, Kennedy said that the evidence for CIA involvement is “very convincing, but is circumstantial.” Continued Kennedy:
We do not have the really strong documentary testimonial evidence that we have with my uncle.
Some of that evidence is detailed in the forthcoming print edition of The New American. And Kennedy’s theory isn’t all that far-fetched. Consider what Sirhan said after he was arrested: He didn’t remember killing Kennedy.
Bernard Diamond, the psychiatrist who examined Sirhan, said Sirhan remembered the assassination only under hypnosis. “Diamond testified that he had hypnotized Kennedy’s killer and had him relive the murder in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles,” the Los Angeles Times reported in Diamond’s obituary:
He found that Sirhan could not recall the shooting of the 1968 presidential candidate unless he was under hypnosis and theorized that Sirhan’s hypnotic remembrance of the assassination — in which Sirhan had convinced himself that he merely wanted to shake Kennedy’s hand and not shoot him — could have been a lie.
Similarities With JFK Murder
Sirhans’s purported amnesia mirrors other such claims. Jack Ruby claimed he didn’t remember shooting Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald supposedly assassinated President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The CIA’s MKUltra psychiatrist, Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, examined Ruby and declared him insane. Other psychiatrists who examined Ruby before West found him sane.
MKUltra was an illegal CIA brainwashing program. West and others used drugs not only to induce amnesia, mental disorders, and false information into subjects, but also to reverse their moral beliefs without their knowledge. That would include inducing a subject to trespass his own morals and not remember it.
In 1954, Jimmy Shaver, an airman at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, murdered a little girl and remembered nothing of it. Jolly West was stationed there and conducted MKUltra experiments on airmen. Only under hypnosis — carried out by West, of course — did Shaver recall the killing. He maintained his innocence until he was executed.
Given Sirhan’s bizarre notebook and his claim that he didn’t remember murdering Kennedy, perhaps Kennedy, Jr. is half right.
