A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  After 25 years of research, I now believe I understand what happened at the Ambassador Hotel that night. I believe the truth about these events informs our current political situation. And I believe you have a part to play in this story as well. The truth can set us all free. Read on. Then find me on Twitter (@lisapease) and tell me what you think.

  INTRODUCTION

  by James DiEugenio

  THE ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT KENNEDY IN LOS ANGELES ON June 5, 1968, is perhaps the most ignored American historical milestone in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, virtually no historian recognizes it as such. Which is odd since it is clearly a marker in two ways. First, his murder climaxed a series of four major assassinations in less than five years. Preceding his assassination were those of his brother President John Kennedy, Malcolm X, and RFK’s friend and colleague Martin Luther King. All four of these deaths were caused by gunfire, and were redolent with suspicious circumstances. It was impossible to delineate the truth about the actual facts pertaining to them since, in each case, a cover-up ensued almost immediately afterwards. In an earlier book, Lisa Pease and I co-edited an anthology from Probe Magazine called The Assassinations, which tried to demonstrate the commonalities between the four cases.

  The second way in which Senator Kennedy’s death is a watershed relates to the outline above. His murder marked the end of an era: it was the premature death of the Sixties. I do not mean that as pure numerology, but in the sense that, in June of 1968, Robert Kennedy represented the last great desperate hope for the social and political activism of that remarkable decade. When he was killed, it was killed. Or as Jean Genet reportedly said, “America is gone.” It is difficult to understand what that means unless one is old enough to have lived through the era. And fortunately—or unfortunately—I was. No feature film or documentary I know of has ever been able to encapsulate the energy, the idealism, the sense of empowerment that so many people felt from 1961 to 1968.

  And Robert Kennedy—from the beginning—was right there in the middle of it.

  RFK became the first Attorney General to rigorously enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. He had planned on breaking the walls of discrimination by using those legal tools to file civil actions showing that the states of the former confederacy were circumventing federal law. To do so, he hired dozens of new lawyers in his civil rights department, and almost a score of researchers to secure data proving his charges. The Attorney General filed almost twice as many civil cases in 12 months as his predecessor had in eight years!

  This was such a drastic change from the Eisenhower/Nixon regime that it gave ballast to civil rights groups, and it inspired individuals to defy the status quo in the South. Why? Because they knew the Attorney General would do all he could to protect them. This was the case at the University of Mississippi with James Meredith, and at the University of Alabama with Vivian Malone. Robert Kennedy had Meredith escorted to and from class by two federal marshals during his student career at Ole Miss. Governor George Wallace brought in almost nine hundred state troopers to block Malone from entering his university. The Attorney General brought in General Creighton Abrams with three thousand federal troops. After that nationally televised showdown, it was Robert Kennedy who encouraged his brother to go on network TV to give his epochal civil rights address.

  As John Bohrer notes in his book The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General understood that what he had done for the moral cause of civil rights had extracted a huge political price: He had lost the South for his brother’s 1964 campaign. He therefore drafted a letter of resignation to remove the impact his legacy would have the following year. He did this on November 20, 1963. Therefore, his brother did not have the opportunity to act on it. But such is the stuff of moral and political heroism.

  But it was not just on the domestic scene where RFK proved his mettle. After the CIA hoodwinked his brother into launching the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy put the Attorney General on the White House panel to find out what went wrong with Operation Zapata. The experienced lawyer found that, as his brother suspected, the CIA had deceived the president. They had lied to him about its possibility of success, and then banked on JFK ordering in the navy to avoid a humiliating defeat. When RFK confirmed this, with the advice of his father’s friend Robert Lovett, the Attorney General recommended firing CIA Director Allen Dulles. But after listening to Lovett, the brothers went further and terminated the entire upper level of the Agency: Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Richard Bissell. When is the last time something like that happened? Who was terminated over the catastrophe of 9-11?

  How accurate was Robert Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs? It’s always nice for a prosecuting attorney to get a written confession. As scholar Lucien Vandenbroucke later discovered in the Dulles archives at Princeton, Allen Dulles posthumously provided just that. In notes prepared for a magazine article, he admitted that such was his strategy: knowing the operation had little chance of success, he wanted President Kennedy to commit American military forces into Cuba. In 1984, when Vandenbroucke published an article in Diplomatic History on the subject, Bissell also confessed to this hidden agenda.

  As more than one author has noted, after this, Bobby Kennedy became one of the president’s closest foreign policy advisors, going as far as serving as his back channel emissary during the Berlin Crisis in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and in the implementation of the withdrawal from Vietnam in 1963.

  Because of his position as First Ambassador, RFK understood what his brother had been attempting to do after the missile crisis, which was to form a rapprochement with both Russia and Cuba. After his brother’s death RFK conveyed a message to the Soviets that JFK’s plan for relaxing tensions would have to be placed on hold during President Johnson’s administration; but he himself would soon resign, run for political office and then the presidency, at which point it would be continued.

  For reasons minutely explicated in this book, that did not occur. But the real point is this: when one adds to the above his nine years as a congressional chief counsel before he became Attorney General, and his three and a half years as a senator afterwards, was there a better post-World War II candidate for president than Robert Kennedy? And if there was not, what does his loss represent to this country?

  If the historians do not understand that loss, those around the event in 1968 certainly did. His funeral mass in New York was watched by over 100 million spectators via television. At that funeral, SDS leader Tom Hayden and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley both choked back tears. Jackie Kennedy had wept over his casket at a private wake, something she did not do over her husband’s death. Two million people lined the railroad tracks to bid their final farewells as his corpse was transported back to Washington to be buried near his brother at Arlington Cemetery. When it got there, hundreds of spectators from King’s last crusade, the Poor People’s March, came to pay their respects. As Arthur Schlesinger revealed in his biography of Robert Kennedy, it was the senator who had given King the idea to bring the poor to Washington in order to force Congress to act. Which is one of the reasons King had decided to endorse RFK over Eugene McCarthy.

  Robert Kennedy was the buffer that kept people like Hayden and Daley from savaging each other; he was the inspiration that made students and peace activists believe the Vietnam War would now end, who made King think that once that occurred, he would finally get economic progress in addition to civil rights. It all came asunder at the Ambassador Hotel in June of 1968. We then saw the results in August in Chicago, where the Democratic Party unraveled and caused the election of the anti-RFK, Richard Nixon. Vietnam went on for four more years and expanded into Laos and Cambodia, the latter invasion provoking one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century. Thus the tragic arc of the decade was completed. It began with a Camelot period of hope and ambition; after 1963 it shifted into the angry sixties of Selma and massive antiwar
demonstrations; after RFK, it dissipated into an escape into the drugs and rock music of Woodstock.

  But as Congressman Allard Lowenstein eloquently asked: Why did so many intelligent people accept Sirhan as the lone killer of Robert Kennedy? To the point that they could not imagine the solution being anything else?

  Because the Robert Kennedy case became known as the Open-and-Shut Case. After all, there were dozens of witnesses who saw Sirhan with a handgun firing at the senator from the front. Therefore he had to have been guilty. And this is the pretext the LAPD and the district attorney’s office used to snap on the cover-up—for the public. But as this book reveals, there was a lot to conceal to make the Open and Shut Case appear credible.

  But what Lisa Pease shows in even more careful detail was the fact that Sirhan Sirhan did not get anywhere near the defense he was entitled to. Contrary to what people understand it to be, Sirhan’s trial was not about the question of his culpability in the murders at the Ambassador Hotel the night of Bobby Kennedy’s electoral victory in California. It was really about the state of mind of the defendant at the time of the shooting. As this book shows, Sirhan resisted this angle of defense. So much so that he said in frustration he had planned the whole thing for twenty years. From before he would have entered kindergarten, had he been in America then. Sirhan never got a trial on his guilt or innocence in the RFK case. His defense team assumed he was guilty. In this they were worse off than the prosecution. At the book shows, they at least understood the problems with the evidence. Sirhan’s lawyers never explored those problems.

  As noted, the trial was really about Sirhan’s state of mind at the time of the shooting. Therefore, psychologists were allowed to spend hours on end with the defendant. More than one person observed how easily Sirhan was hypnotized. All the psychologists who have examined Sirhan have noted how quickly and deeply he could be sent into a trance state. And also how resolutely he would deny he had been hypnotized once he snapped out of it. The few people who studied the case began to reread the novel by Richard Condon published in 1959, The Manchurian Candidate.

  Having lived in Los Angeles for nearly four decades I understand that during most of that interval it has really been a one-newspaper town, dominated by the Los Angeles Times. One can measure the Times’ honesty and credibility by what editor Shelby Coffee ordered his staff to do to the late Gary Webb’s stories on the importation of crack cocaine into Los Angeles through dealer Ricky Ross. (If you are not familiar with that episode, see the fine film Kill the Messenger.) At the time of the RFK murder, the Times was owned by the Chandler family. All one needs to know about that fact is that Harry Chandler was the model for the John Huston character in the classic film Chinatown. The scheme depicted in the film—the funneling of water to the San Fernando Valley from the Owens Valley—actually occurred.

  Thus the Times was instrumental in the defeat of Upton Sinclair in his race for governor in 1934, and they backed Richard Nixon from the start of his career. They had always been close to the LAPD, and they fell into line on the RFK case. But it was not just the Times. Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post also did what they could to discredit those who thought something was wrong with the evidence in the case. Because of this media cover-up, most of the public does not know very much about the evidentiary problems in the case.

  This book makes a quantum leap forward, in both the explication of the crime and the cover-up. Lisa Pease has found new evidence that is too abundant to list here. Some of it no one even knew existed. Some of it surprised even someone as jaded as myself. On one key item, she called me up at night and told me to come down to the library she was at to see it. It was so exculpatory of Sirhan that she thought it would soon disappear, and if so she needed someone to bear witness. I will not try to summarize the case presented here, but I will say this: if Sirhan ever got a new trial, this book could be used to set him free. I doubt a prosecutor would even bring a case once he examined its contents. Former California Attorney General and now Senator Kamala Harris would have been humiliated in court. Which explains why she resisted reopening the case.

  Lisa Pease has labored long and hard on the Robert Kennedy case. She has been researching in the archival documentation and calling witnesses for 25 years. She had to. When a cover-up is this systemic it makes it hard to get at the truth. And it is a shame that a private citizen with limited resources had to take it upon herself to do so.

  As her book shows, the RFK case was never an open-and-shut case. In fact, the Robert Kennedy case is more clearly a conspiracy than the John Kennedy case. As some have said: One does not need to commit the perfect crime to escape detection. One only needs to control the cover up. Which includes the mainstream media, which, disgracefully, is all too eager to tag along. Ms. Pease demonstrates that paradigm in a way that no other author has before. As I noted, the murder of Robert Kennedy was a milestone in American history. This book is a milestone in the literature on that case.

  A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL

  HOPE

  “This country is going to kill another Kennedy. And then we won’t have a country.”

  DRIVING THROUGH PRE-DAWN LOS ANGELES ON JUNE 4, 1968, veteran reporter Jack Newfield saw an inspiring sight. Large numbers of African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and blue-collar workers were already in lines at polling places, waiting for their chance to vote for Senator Robert Kennedy in the Democratic presidential primary. By the end of the day, the turnout in Watts and East L.A. would surpass Beverly Hills, upending the longstanding political maxim that the poor don’t count because the poor don’t vote.

  Kennedy had forged this unusual coalition through what Newfield wrote was the best political platform he had ever heard. “It’s class, not color,” Kennedy had explained during his successful Indiana primary campaign a few weeks earlier. “What everyone wants is a job and some hope.”1

  Hope had been dealt a body blow during Kennedy’s Indiana campaign. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by a sniper.2 King had been killed on the one-year anniversary of his first speech challenging the U.S. role in the war in Vietnam, a speech that changed his enemies from racists to the national security state.

  Despite pleas from his staff, fearing for his safety, to skip the Indianapolis event, Kennedy went to his prearranged rally, threw out his prepared speech, and delivered a hastily crafted one instead. As he informed the crowd of King’s death, he pleaded for understanding, not hatred and violence. He reminded them his own brother had also been killed by a white man. And while ghettos all over the country burst into violent riots at the news, the ghettos of Indianapolis remained quiet that night.

  The following day, with violence across the country still echoing, Kennedy quoted President Lincoln, warning that “Among free men … there can be no appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”3 Years later, Newfield would describe how King’s death became a turning point for Kennedy:

  Kennedy sought the Presidency in 1968, he said, and believed, because of the war in Vietnam. But Dr. King’s murder, preceded as it was by Johnson’s abdication and the start of peace talks, enabled Kennedy to glimpse the deeper roots of America’s internal disease and to imagine himself as the healer of that disease.

  Kennedy had for several years been tormented by the poverty and unhappiness of the other America. But it was only campaigning for the Presidency, feeling the love for him among the poor, seeing his huge vote margins from slum districts, that showed Kennedy that his passion for the poor was reciprocated.

  This did not happen in one moment. It was perceived in action during the final weeks of Kennedy’s life, as he spoke about poverty and racism, as he campaigned among the poor, and gradually came to comprehend how much he meant to them, and to understand that his career was no longer the private property of the Kennedy family, but that it also belonged to the dispossessed who cheered him with such
hopes and voted for him in such numbers.4

  Numbers were just what Kennedy needed today. He was still recovering from a defeat in Oregon the previous week. He’d lost in part due to a Drew Pearson column that ran the Friday before the election, which accused the Senator of having bugged Martin Luther King. President Johnson had leaked the story, with Hoover’s permission, to Pearson.5 The truth, however, was more complicated.

  Kennedy had approved the wiretapping of King because he wanted to prove to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that King was not the Communist threat the Bureau believed him to be. Kennedy authorized, with King’s knowledge, a wiretap on the phone line in King’s office and home.6 What Kennedy never approved was the bugging of King’s hotel rooms. Kennedy handled the issue poorly with the press, and Senator Eugene McCarthy seized on it immediately. The result: Kennedy lost in Oregon.

  Kennedy found the loss strangely freeing. Now, no one could accuse him of riding on the coattails of his assassinated brother, President John F. Kennedy. He’d win or lose on his own merits.

  The morning of the primary, June 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy slept in. The day before, Kennedy had campaigned in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Beach, Watts, San Diego, and Los Angeles again. He had covered 1,200 miles in 12 hours before spending the night at the Malibu beachfront home of John Frankenheimer.

  The choice of Frankenheimer would prove ironic. Frankenheimer had directed the film The Manchurian Candidate, in which a U.S. soldier is captured in Manchuria, hypnotized by Communists, and sent back to the U.S. to be used as a mind-controlled assassin. Before the next 24 hours were over, a consultant to that film would suggest on the radio that Robert Kennedy’s assailant had been hypnotically programmed. Shortly before his death, that consultant would also claim to have been the assailant’s hypnotist.