Why can’t these things be clear?
You don’t want to be accused of paranoia. You want to be reasonable. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy four times on June 5, 1968 in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
He was grabbed by Bobby Kennedy’s body guards, and George Plimpton, and wrestled to the ground, and handed over to the police. The gun was right there. Everyone was in one small room, a kitchen. Seventy-seven people, seventy-six suspects. It should have been open and shut. Every bullet could be traced.
But if you do a search on the internet, or at any book store, you will see a cornucopia of websites and books claiming to prove that Bobby Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy. Sirhan was hypnotized or brain-washed. There was a woman in a polka dot dress who fled the scene saying, “we got him”, like most assassins do. There were all the people in the world who hated Bobby Kennedy.
Right. Now, we know there is are substantive reasons why some smart people suspect there was a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s followers certainly had cause for suspicions about a government role in his killing, but isn’t it getting a little ridiculous to start seeing conspiracies everywhere?
But it’s not simple. The autopsy stated, with great clarity and forcefulness, that Bobby Kennedy was shot from behind, at a range of “inches”. There were black power burns on his skin and his jacket. The angle of the gun was upwards, at a very steep incline.
Sirhan, as everybody knows, was standing directly in front of Kennedy, facing him, a few feet away. Kennedy never turned. He was shot, he dropped to his back, he said, “is everyone all right”, and that was it.
There are additional questions about how many shots were fired. A door jam that was removed from the kitchen because it may have had bullet holes in it was senselessly destroyed by the Los Angeles police. They claimed it didn’t have real bullet holes in it. So some genius said, “let’s destroy it, so people will forever suspect we got rid of it because it proved there was more than one gun man.”
Why are police officers or detectives never fired for making stupid decisions, like that one? If it really was just innocent stupidity, surely it was stupid enough to justify firing the officer responsible for incompetence? No? And you wonder why people go off on conspiracy theories?
Not one of the 77 people in the room can explain how Sirhan got behind Kennedy and got his pistol inches away from his ear and killed him. There are no photographs showing anything useful– at least partly because the Los Angeles Police decided to destroy more than 1,000 of them before the trial.
There is no adequate explanation. Something sucks here. I don’t want to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist but I’d like to hear a good explanation of why the autopsy doesn’t correspond to the eye-witness testimony and the government’s explanation of what happened in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, on June 8, 1968.
You know, it would do wonders for public confidence in the police and government if just once– just once!–a closely observed investigation by the police would show them to be diligent, authoritative, rational, and objective. But it seems that every time we get a close-up look at how the police operate, we find misplaced evidence, incorrect procedures, sloppiness, prejudice, and incompetence. In the Robert Kennedy assassination, for example, you have the mishandling of the gun. You have the fact that no search warrant was obtained for the search of Sirhan’s room. You have the destruction of evidence before the trial, and broken chains of possession.
By the way, some web pages state that Robert Kennedy “likely” would have been the Democratic nominee for president in 1968. In fact, Kennedy did not have enough delegates– Hubert Humphrey was in the lead. Thanks to the way most political conventions were “fixed” back then, barring some extraordinary back-room maneuvering, Kennedy was not going to be the nominee. (Most delegates were controlled by party figures who would broker a deal that would determine who the nominee would be.)
Did you know who told Bobby Kennedy that his brother, John, had been shot? Do you know who passed on this devastating news? The much despised J. Edgar Hoover! I’m not surprised, I suppose, but I do wonder why the Secret Service didn’t contact Bobby in person, or Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell, or Lyndon Johnson.
Robert Kennedy was at a meeting at the time, sitting around his pool, apparently.
J. Edgar Hoover was emotionless. I wonder if he might have said, “I’m sorry, Bobby– we failed to do our job.” But a man like that doesn’t say that. He says, “there’s nothing you can do if he’s going to drive around in an open convertible.” The guy we caught will be guilty.