ROBERT F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION

The 'assassination of Robert F. Kennedy' ocurred on June 5, 1968. Kennedy, New York's junior United States Senator and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was fatally wounded by gunshots at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at approximately 12:16 a.m. PDT; he died more than 25 hours later at Good Samaritan Hospital.
The convicted assassin, 24-year-old Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan, is widely thought to have been acting alone. A diary alleged to have been penned by Sirhan seemed to attribute the killing to Kennedy's support for Israel during and after the Six-Day War. On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles court, Sirhan admitted that he had killed Kennedy. Sirhan has since recanted, and as late as 1998 has sought a new trial. ^[1]

Contents

Background

Assassination

As it happened on television

Others wounded

Disputes and contentions

Kennedy's wounds

Pruszynski recording

Allegations of suppression or coverup

Additional bullet holes or gunshots

Conspiracy theories

CIA operatives

Sirhan's motivations

See also

Notes

External links

Background

As United States 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, 1968 Democratic presidential primaries in South Dakota and California, boosting his chances for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States for the 1968 election.

Assassination

Kennedy addressed his supporters shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. At 12:15 a.m. PDT, he and his entourage walked from the podium to a back corridor behind the ballroom and then through a kitchen pantry, shaking hands with well-wishers and hotel staff. The small pantry apparently was crowded when, at 12:16 a.m., a 24-year-old man named Sirhan Sirhan stepped in front of Kennedy and purportedly exclaimed "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!"^[2] before firing an eight shot, .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver toward Kennedy and his entourage.
Hotel assistant maître d' 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.
As Kennedy lay on the floor of the hotel kitchen pantry, busboy Juan Romero cradled his head and placed a rosary in his hand^[3]. This became the iconic image of the assassination^[4]
However it seems there is strong evidence to support a conspiracy. In Sirhan Sirhan's trial, the Los Angeles county coroner testified that Senator Kennedy's fatal bullet struck him in the back of the head and came from only a few inches away. Yet witnesses to the shooting placed Sirhan in front of the Senator and the tip of his gun no closer than one foot from Kennedy. In June 2007, Discovery Times presented audio tape evidence that seemed to indicate a second gunman indeed was firing shots inside the hotel's kitchen pantry nearly simultaneously with the shots being fired by Sirhan. And in November 2006, BBC presented photographic and video tape evidence that seemed to indicate three CIA operatives were at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the assassination.

As it happened on television

The shooting was not broadcast live but, decades later, it was discovered that the shots were recorded on audio tape by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a freelance newspaper reporter. Shortly after the assassination, the only tape associated with the assassination and widely known to the public at that time was an audio recording of the shooting aftermath made by reporter Andrew West of KRKD, a Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate in Los Angeles. Although West's recording captured none of the shots, the radio newsman provided an on-the-spot account of the struggle with Sirhan Sirhan in the hotel kitchen pantry ^[5].
Earlier, while still on the ballroom 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 response that seems somewhat garbled in West's recording, Kennedy indicated a "struggle" lay ahead for his party's presidential nomination. It was moments later, as West followed the Kennedy party into the kitchen area, that he turned his tape recorder back on (upon hearing shouts that Kennedy had been shot) and recorded the immediate aftermath of the assassination.
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. By that time, though, not all CBS affiliates were still airing the network's feed of live pictures from the hotel. For the next 2 minutes, CBS cameras panned the crowd in that ballroom as well as another crowd of supporters downstairs in the hotel's Ambassador Room ballroom. The Embassy Room crowd was dispersing following Kennedy's victory statement, while the Ambassador Room crowd was chanting, "RFK! RFK! RFK!" in anticipation that the Senator was about to come downstairs to address them as well.
As microphones picked up the sound of supporters in the lower Ambassador Room chanting "Kennedy, Kennedy, rah, rah, rah! Kennedy, Kennedy, shish, boom, bah!", a CBS camera upstairs showed supporters in the Embassy Room reacting to the shooting that had just taken place, off-camera, in the kitchen pantry just off the Embassy Room.
While CBS's audio feed switched from the Ambassador Room to match the pictures of alarm in the Embassy Room, the upper ballroom's northside service doors leading to the pantry could be seen swinging open and the sounds of screaming and chaos could be heard. It was clear that the joyous crowd was now overcome with confusion and, in some cases, panic.
CBS News correspondent Terry Drinkwater, standing at the podium where Kennedy 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 they were rolling videotape. From the podium, 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 about the shooting; eventually, he and other newsmen were given some details from other individuals who had witnessed either the shooting or its immediate aftermath.
CBS newsman Roger Mudd, who also had been at the Ambassador covering the events with Drinkwater, followed the ambulance to Central Receiving Hospital where Kennedy had been first taken, then to Good Samaritan Hospital to continue on-the-spot coverage. Initially reporting from the CBS Newsroom in New York in the first hours following the shooting were Joseph Benti and, briefly, Mike Wallace. Walter Cronkite eventually joined Benti on the network's anchor set.
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, reporters tried to learn how many other people were hurt.

Others wounded

Initially, there were conflicting reports as to the total number of bystanders shot. Eventually it was confirmed that five other people were wounded: William Weisel of ABC News; Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers; Democratic Party activist Elizabeth Evans; Continental News Service reporter Ira Goldstein; and Kennedy campaign volunteer Irwin Stroll.
At least two other persons were accidentally injured by being struck in the face by camera equipment. Although not physically wounded, singer Rosemary Clooney, a great supporter of Kennedy's, was present in the ballroom during the shooting in the pantry and suffered a nervous breakdown shortly afterward ^[6]; two of Clooney's children also witnessed the shooting aftermath in the ballroom, including Hollywood actor Miguel Ferrer who was 13 at the time.
Over the next 25 1/2 hours, television and radio broadcast live coverage as Kennedy aide Frank Mankewicz provided several updates at Good Samaritan Hospital on the Senator's condition. TV and radio aired live Mankiewicz's announcement, at 1:59 a.m. PDT on June 6, that Kennedy had died only 15 minutes before at 1:44 a.m. PDT.

Disputes and contentions

There seems to be no dispute that Sirhan did fire his revolver.
What is disputed is whether Sirhan planned and acted alone, whether there was another gunman at the scene, and whether Sirhan fired bullets or blanks. As with his brother John's assassination in 1963, Robert's death has been analyzed by many who have developed various alternative scenarios for the crime, or who argue there are serious problems with the official case. One theory is that the same people who orchestrated John F. Kennedy's assassination were behind his younger brother's murder 4 1/2 years later.

Kennedy's wounds

Sirhan's gun was placed by all witnesses at between 2 and 5 feet from the Senator when he fired his revolver. ^[7] All witnesses seemed to agree Sirhan was facing Kennedy when he fired.
In conducting the autopsy on Kennedy, Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on Kennedy's ear and gunpowder residue in his hair. Noguchi said this indicated that Kennedy was shot from a distance of, at most, 1.5 inches (37 millimeters.) (When a firearm is discharged, the powder residue travels only a few inches because the material is very light.) Noguchi's conclusions led to speculation that Sirhan was too far from Kennedy and in the wrong position to have administered the fatal shot (also fired from a .22 caliber handgun, one which had apparently been fired into Kennedy's head at point-blank range from behind his right ear) and that a second shooter must have been present. Dr. Noguchi wrote years later that:
Independent testing (shown in a 2004 "Unsolved History" series program on the Discovery Channel) indicates that gunpowder residue can easily travel over 15 inches (38 cm), but that the stippling effect observed requires that the gun must have been less than 2 inches (5 cm) away.

Pruszynski recording

On June 6, 2007, the Discovery Times Channel presented a television program on the Robert Kennedy case entitled "," which provides powerful scientific evidence that convicted gunman Sirhan Sirhan did not act alone. ^[8] The centerpiece of this one-hour documentary was the only known sound recording of the Bobby Kennedy shooting—an audio tape that had not been broadcast in the 39 years since the murder—and which, according to three out of four audio analysts featured in the program, shows that a second gun was fired in the Senator's assassination.
The audio recording was made by freelance newspaper reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski, who was covering Senator Kennedy's presidential campaign for the Montreal Gazette and today resides in his native Poland. Pruszynski made the recording with a battery-powered portable cassette tape recorder and an attached microphone. At the time, Pruszynski was unaware that his machine was still recording as it captured the sounds of the Senator's shooting.
Pruszynski also was unaware of the shooting itself because it was taking place amidst the various sounds of celebration, some distance away inside another room and outside the reporter's purview. He and his recording equipment were approximately 40 feet southwest of Senator Kennedy when the shots erupted inside a hotel kitchen pantry. At that time, Pruszynski was about to enter a narrow back corridor leading into the pantry from the hotel’s Embassy Room, a ballroom where Kennedy had just delivered his victory statement following the Tuesday, June 4 California Democratic primary election. When the shooting commenced, Pruszynski was at the north side of the ballroom and descending a small set of steps at the east end of the ballroom's makeshift stage where Kennedy had spoken. Although he did not know his recorder was still recording at that point, Pruszynski just happened to be holding his microphone tilted upward and pointed toward the pantry, and above the heads of the crowd on the ballroom floor beneath him. All doors between Pruszynski and the shooting were open at the time.
As the Kennedy shooting continued in the kitchen pantry, Pruszynski continued moving toward the pantry, getting somewhat closer to the shooting but still unaware of the shots erupting in that other room. Film and video shot by more than one camera in the Embassy Room—in particular, an ABC-TV black and white video-relay camera—captured pictures of Pruszynski, his recorder and microphone in hand, as he descended the ballroom platform's east steps and proceeded toward the pantry precisely as the shooting was taking place off-camera, inside that pantry.
It is clear to the average listener that Stanislaw Pruszynski's audio recording captured several rapidly occurring sounds, each one very short in duration and with something of a popping or even clapping quality. "Conspiracy Test" quoted four audio analysts who examined the Pruszynski recording: two experts in the United States, a third in Denmark and a fourth in the United Kingdom. Three of them determined that the tape had captured at least 10 gunshots—and possibly as many as 13 shots—in the RFK assassination; all other possible sources for the sounds, including popping balloons, ricochets, echoes, etc., were ruled out. The presence of at least 10 shots is highly significant because Sirhan's handgun could fire no more than eight shots at a single time and because Sirhan possessed only the one revolver and had no opportunity to reload his weapon once the shooting erupted in the pantry. Thus, scientific confirmation of more than eight shots being fired in the RFK assassination would be strong evidence of a second gun being fired by someone other than Sirhan.
The fourth audio expert dissented on the issue of number of shots, reporting that he was only able to confirm seven or eight shots in the Pruszynski recording. However, the Discovery Times program made it clear that the fourth expert had not been provided all of the information and materials that had been made available to the other three experts. While all four experts bypassed a crude cassette copy of the Pruszynski recording that had been created years before by the California State Archives in Sacramento, only the first three experts worked directly from several high-quality digital and analog master dubs of the recording; the fourth expert had to rely on a copy of just one of those master dubs. Unlike the first three experts, the fourth expert also did not know where Pruszynski and his microphone were located during the Kennedy shooting and was unaware that Pruszynski and his microphone were moving while the shots were being fired. In the TV program, the fourth expert conceded, "Any information relating to where Mr. Pruszynski was standing at the time or any movements he made during the sequence of shots would, to some degree, have been of assistance."
The Pruszynski recording's importance rests not only upon the number of shots fired but also upon another key issue: the intervals between the shots. Accordingly, two of the four audio experts reported that the Pruszynski recording contains evidence of a second gunman firing virtually simultaneously with Sirhan. They determined—and a firearms expert concurred—that at least two of the shots captured on Pruszynski's sound recording were fired too close together for both to have come from Sirhan's revolver.
The dissenting fourth expert did not address the key issue of shot intervals.
The significance of the Pruszynski recording was unknown for 36 years until early 2004, when a journalist obtained a copy of the California State Archives's crude cassette dub of the recording. Not only does the Pruszynski recording's preservation of the RFK shots provide powerful evidence that a second gunman was involved in the Senator's assassination; it's the only audio recording known to have captured the shooting. Despite what some have believed over the years, two other sound recordings made that night by newsmen Andrew West of Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate KRKD and Jeff Brent of the Continental News Service actually did not capture the shots in the Robert Kennedy assassination. Instead, the West and Brent tapes recorded only the shooting's immediate aftermath.
Discovery Times's "Conspiracy Test" concluded by posing this question: "Will the continuing respect for Robert Kennedy and the new evidence of a second gunman lead to a re-opening of the RFK assassination?" One of the program's first three audio analysts answered it this way: "My feeling about the evidence that's come up here is that you can't back away from real stuff. It merits closer examination. And as a citizen of this country (I believe) it has to be looked at."

Allegations of suppression or coverup

James Scott Enyart has said he was actively photographing the inside of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry at the moment of the shooting. Furthermore he contends that his three, 36-exposure rolls were confiscated by the LAPD and sealed by court-order for 20 years, and never returned in full which resulted in a lengthy court battle, from 1989 to 1996. The most important piece of photographic evidence, allegedly featuring the scenes of the Senator falling and bullet holes in the door frame and ceiling, were confined in 10 pictures found to be missing from the third negative. The Enyart trial was, from the start, surrounded by a series of blunders, including tampering with evidence in the archives, in addition to the disappearance of a large amount of related court files, and ultimately the missing negative and stolen first-generation prints. ^[9] Enyart eventually won the trial against the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD and was consequently granted a financial settlement of $450,000. Among Enyart's principal witnesses were Sirhan’s official researchers such as Lynn Mangan and Ted Charach. ^[10]
Sandy Serrano said that during questioning, she was intimidated by police and forced to change her story. The official LAPD transcript of her polygraph interview seems to show that she was pressured to change her statement.
^[11]

Additional bullet holes or gunshots

Sirhan's .22 revolver held eight cartridges. The official conclusion is that Sirhan fired all of his cartridges and all eight projectiles were recovered. Others have suggested there were more than eight shots fired. A police officer watched police criminalists dig two bullets out of a door frame in the pantry area, bringing the total number of shots that were fired during the attack to 10. FBI documents describe holes depicted in the pantry door frame as "bullet holes", and William Bailey, the first FBI agent on the scene, has stated that he saw a bullet in one such hole. An AP photograph shows a bullet lodged in a door frame.
In addition, most of the witnesses in the pantry thought the gun looked and sounded like it was firing blanks. Rafer Johnson said it looked like a cap gun throwing off residue.

Conspiracy theories

Many claims of a "second shooter" point to a part-time armed security guard escorting Kennedy, a 26-year-old Lockheed employee 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 began firing. Apparently, Kennedy suddenly grabbed Cesar's clip-on necktie with his right hand when hit; the 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 proven false; it was later discovered that Cesar had instead sold the gun three months after the assassination. The buyer of that revolver later reported it 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. The .22 caliber gun was recovered from a lake in Blue Mountain, Arkansas, in 1993. This .22, a HR Nineshot, Serial Number Y13332 is in California and registered with the California Department of Justice as of May 26, 2007.. In 1994, a report surfaced that was immediately discredited as a prank. Supposedly a gun found on Fruit Street in La Verne, California, was reported to have matching serial numbers, but the La Verne Police Department discredited the report as the same street had frequent reports of high school prankster activities.
Skeptic Dan Moldea, author of ''The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy,'' which argues that Sirhan Sirhan acted alone, has 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.

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 on June 5, 1968. Among 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 Invasion. 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 and private investigator 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 over which the CIA had no jurisdiction. ^[12][13][14]

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, because 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. Coleman suggests Sirhan saw himself as a Palestinian militant.
In a diary police found at Sirhan's home, Sirhan had written, "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more and more 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."

See also

★ Kennedy Curse

★ Kennedy family

★ List of assassinated American politicians

Notes

1. Sirhan Sirhan and the 30th Anniversary of the Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy
2. RFK Assassination Far From Resolved Thom White
3. Guarding the Dream Steve Lopez
4. title
5. Hear it Now! RFK ASSASSINATED
6. Rosemary Clooney: 1928-2002
7. title
8. Discovery Times Channel Reveals Previously Unknown Audio of Robert Kennedy's Death in CONSPIRACY TEST: THE RFK ASSASSINATION
9. New Twist in Kennedy Mystery
10. Sirhan’s Researcher
11. title
12. CIA role claim in Kennedy killing
13. Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy? Shane O'Sullivan
14. http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/112206CARMICHAEL.html

External links

★ Discovery Times Series ''Conspiracy Test'' -- Episode on new RFK tape, the Pruszynski recording, set for 9pm June 6th, to shed new light on the RFK assassination

★ Discovery Times Channel Reveals Previously Unknown Audio of Robert Kennedy's Death in CONSPIRACY TEST: THE RFK ASSASSINATION

★ (AUDIO) Black Op Radio interview concerning the Pruszynski recording on August 9, 2007

★ 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 the late P.H. Melanson, Ph.D., Chancellor Professor of Policy Studies at the 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 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 Assassination Far From Resolved by Thom White