RFK Murder Scoop Divides Family as 50th Anniversary Nears June 5

Two high-profile children of slain U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (shown above minutes before his death) have disputed during the past week the official account of his assassination 50 years ago, thereby prompting renewed debate amongst others as news coverage mounts before the murder’s 50th anniversary on June 5.

Longtime law professor and environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and an experienced Washington Post reporter raised the profile of the long-simmering controversy with a front-page Sunday story by Tom Jackman published on May 26 entitled, Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan.

The son shown is shown at far right in a portrait by Gage Skidmore next to a file photo of his father on the 1968 presidential campaign trail.

Jackman, a Post reporter covering law enforcement since 1998, obtained this scoop: The younger Kennedy was ready to go public in an in-depth manner after spending months re-examining the evidence and meeting in prison with Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of the murder in a 1969 jury trial in which defense counsel mounted scant defense.

“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Kennedy told Jackman of the defendant, shown at right in a 2016 prison photo.

“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” said Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father’s 11 children. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Kennedy’s comments and the Post’s display of them represent breakthrough coverage of the case for a mainstream publication — and a challenge to other family members, authorities, opinion leaders and indeed any concerned citizen. The challenge is whether the oft-reported basic facts of such a high-profile assassination could have been so incomplete or suppressed as to lead to a false imprisonment — and an escaped murderer or murderers.

That’s an assessment provided in an exclusive interview June 4 by Dr. William Pepper, a close friend of the late Senator Kennedy and also the current defense counsel for Sirhan. It took years for Pepper to become convinced that Sirhan was innocent of killing RFK, not just in a technical legal sense but also as a matter of scientific and other proof.

Pepper, shown at right with his friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) at a major political conference in 1967, was a journalist and activist who last year summarized RFK evidence in a pending petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a unit of the Organization of American States (IACHR/OAS), seeking what Pepper calls the first evidentiary hearing ever in the Sirhan murder case.

He regards Jackman’s reporting as extraordinary, much like the Washington Post’s willingness to print it, as well as a breakthrough story by Jackman on March 30, Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed. Jackman, a Post reporter covering courts and crime since 1998, quoted prominent members of MLK’s family as saying they did not believe that his convicted killer James Earl Ray really killed the civil rights leader in April 1968 in Memphis. 

“More than any other mainstream media journalist,” Pepper told me regarding RFK’s murder, “Tom Jackman has gone in-depth into the evidence of the case related to Sirhan’s alleged guilt and has very clearly shown that evidence was withheld and that Sirhan was selected as a victim of CIA MK Ultra mind control efforts to be set up as a patsy through the use of hypnosis and chemicals. His role was to perform a distraction so that the real assassin could do his work and put three bullets into RFK’s body at much closer range while Sirhan was always three to five feet in from of the senator.” 

Other Mainstream Reporting

Conventional wisdom is that reporters, editors and their news outlets always seek to publish verifiable information challenging the power structure, especially for suspected misconduct in something like a high-profile murder case.

The track record on truly sensitive topics  is less than impressive, however, especially if new reporting undermines decades of previous coverage and powerful institutional relationships, as we reported on May 29 in our most recent  column here, Rights Pioneer’s Obit Prompts Disputes Over JFK Murder Half-Truths. Our column began: “The Washington Post’s obituary last week of a pioneering African-American lawyer continued the newspaper’s controversial coverage of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 1964 murder of JFK’s friend and purported lover Mary Pinchot Meyer.”

Regarding the RFK coverage, the Post’s most recent big stories were quite varied in their assumptions.

The gist of Jackman’s in-depth piece on May 26 contrasted sharply with a Post Sunday Magazine story a week later, What is it like to be the brother of Robert Kennedy’s assassin? The life of the other Sirhan. For the magazine piece, Los Angeles-based freelance author Peter Gilstrap accepted Sirhan’s guilt with scant attempt to explore the possibility of his innocence. The discrepancy doubtless occurred in part because of the long lead time for magazine articles, which are generated separately from the Post’s news staff. Nonetheless, the supposedly in-depth treatment that a magazine is supposed to provide managed to miss much of the gist of four decades of investigative revelations. 

The Washington Post published in its news section on the same day, June 3, another major treatment, headlined Robert F. Kennedy’s final flight: The storied journey of the ride from California to New York. Authored by freelance legal expert David Margolick, it avoided the issue of murder guilt and focused instead on the mournful yet intriguing airplane flight in which the three widows of 1960s murdered ikons JFK, MLK and RFK accompanied RFK’s corpse from Los Angeles to Washington, DC.  

The Boston Globe, New England’s largest circulation newspaper and presumped to be an authoritative source on the Kennedy family, followed up Jackman’s May 26 scoops in the Post by reporting on May 31 that the late senator’s oldest child, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (shown at left), has been persuaded by her brother Robert Jr.’s analysis to join him in seeking a new investigation of the murder.

But the Globe story, RFK’s children divided over calls for a fresh investigation of his assassination by Michael Levenson on May 31, 2018, also reported that  two other children of the slain senator said this week that they opposed a re-investigation. Levenson reported that this opposition underscores “how divisive the second-gunman theory continues to be, a half-century after the presidential candidate, former attorney general, and senator from New York, was killed in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.”

Those two children objecting to a new investigation were former Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II (shown at right) and Kerry Kennedy, who is president of a human rights organization named for her father.

This dispute about evidence will surprise and shock many. Most people have thought from initial news reports to the present that they knew what happened: Sirhan hated Kennedy, acted alone to kill him, and was convicted after a fair trial. Any doubts about such a consensus casts doubt on enormously important and influential American institutions and leaders, past and present.