Shadow play: the unsolved murder of Robert F. Kennedy

432 Pages·2018·11.2 MB·English

by  William Klaber

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Table of Contents
About the Authors
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Copyright Page

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Shadow Play is dedicated to the memory of Allard K. Lowenstein
and Gregory Stone.
The 2018 edition carries the added dedications to Paul
Schrade, who has fought for the truth for fifty years, and to the
memory of coauthor Professor Philip Melanson, who created the
Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Archives at the University of
Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Robert Kennedy’s death, like the president’s, was mourned as an extension of the evils of senseless
violence … a whimsical fate inconveniently interfering in the workings of democracy. What is odd is
not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to
believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the
general understanding of what is possible in America.
—former New York congressman Allard Lowenstein (1977)
Introduction
As Robert Kennedy addressed the cheering crowd, Paul Schrade looked on with
pride. An hour earlier he had been upstairs at the Ambassador Hotel, working
with the senator on the details of his speech. Now he watched as Kennedy
declared victory in the California primary and assumed his place as a front-
runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
When he had finished speaking, Robert Kennedy stepped off the stage into a
dimly lit hallway en route to another press conference. He spotted Schrade and
called out for him to follow. Kennedy then passed through a set of doors into a
narrow kitchen area, where he paused to shake hands with several busboys.
Finally, Schrade thought, a real president.
Just then, Paul Schrade experienced what felt like a severe electric shock. His
body began to convulse, and as he fell to the floor he was certain he was being
electrocuted.
When he regained consciousness a short while later, Paul Schrade felt bruises
on his chest, where he had been stepped on. There was a sharper pain in his
forehead, where a bullet was lodged. A short distance away Robert Kennedy lay
mortally wounded.
Years later, the pain of that awakening still scarred Schrade. Sirhan Bishara
Sirhan, to everyone’s satisfaction, had been convicted of Robert Kennedy’s
murder, but Schrade was troubled because the wound in his own head made no
sense, given the explanation offered for it by the Los Angeles police. When he
tried to find out more, Schrade discovered that the police files were sealed. But
why?
In 1974, at the urging of former New York congressman Allard Lowenstein,
Paul Schrade joined a small group of citizens trying to open the secret police
files. A year later he became a plaintiff in an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to
force disclosure. In the decade that followed, Schrade took the fight to Mayor
Thomas Bradley and the Los Angeles Police Commission.
Finally, public pressure prevailed. In 1988 the police files in the Robert
Kennedy assassination were made available for inspection by the California
State Archives. Schrade and a small group of researchers (including this book’s
coauthor Philip Melanson) began to slowly sift through the more than fifty
thousand pages of released documents.
On April 2, 1992, almost twenty-four years after the assassination, a silver-
haired Paul Schrade, accompanied by several colleagues, walked down the
polished corridors of the Los Angeles County Courthouse pulling a small wagon
carrying five heavy boxes. In the boxes were copies of a “request,” a formal
petition asking the Los Angeles County Grand Jury to appoint a special
prosecutor to investigate the Los Angeles Police Department for “willful and
corrupt misconduct” in its investigation of the murder of Robert Kennedy.
Accompanying the request were eight hundred pages of exhibits backing up
claims of the LAPD’s “destruction of evidence, falsification of evidence, and
coercion of witnesses.”
In addition to that of Schrade, the petition bore the signatures of over fifty
prominent citizens, including historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., former RFK press
secretary Frank Mankiewicz, former Watergate prosecutor Sam Dash, author
Norman Mailer, farm workers’ leader Cesar Chavez, and Harvard law professor
Gary Bellow.
The request was also signed by several men who played a direct role in the
events surrounding the assassination. One of these was William Bailey, who on
the night of the murder was an agent for the FBI. Bailey inspected the crime
scene and interviewed witnesses a few hours after the shooting. Over time he
became convinced that the official version of the murder was a fabrication.
William Bailey taught criminal justice at a small college in New Jersey. Each
year he put on a mock trial of Sirhan in which the class sat as jury. As Bailey
explained, his trial of Sirhan was a tutorial in the suspension of judgment. “I
want to show them that in criminal investigations, things are not always what
they seem.”
Dr. Cyril Wecht also signed the grand jury petition. Wecht is a lawyer, a
medical doctor, and a former president of the American Academy of Forensic
Sciences. In the days following the death of Robert Kennedy, Wecht worked
with Los Angeles County coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi on the autopsy report.
What he discovered alarmed him. To Wecht, the evidence strongly suggested
that Sirhan Sirhan was not the source of the bullets that struck Robert Kennedy.
“This case has never been as simple as it looked,” he would say. “Forensically
speaking, it’s a puzzle.”
But the assassination of Robert Kennedy was not regarded as a puzzle by
those who investigated the crime. The case against Sirhan Sirhan in their minds
could hardly have been more open and shut. Robert Kennedy was shot and
killed, and Sirhan Sirhan, firing a pistol, was apprehended only a few feet away.
In time, the accused assassin would admit to the crime, offer a motive, and assert
that he acted alone—a prosecutor’s dream. Rumors of conspiracy seemed, for
once, not only unfounded but easily refuted.
But this seemingly most apparent of political assassinations in the 1960s
turns out to be, in many ways, the most complicated; certainly, the most bizarre.
For example, while the accused assassin insisted he acted alone, numerous
witnesses saw him being led to the crime by a beautiful woman, who shortly
thereafter was seen running from the hotel laughing. She then vanished. More
disturbing, ballistic evidence collected by the police strongly suggested that a
second gun was fired during the murder and that Sirhan Sirhan may not have
shot Robert Kennedy at all. Some of the most important pieces of this evidence
also vanished. Most strange, despite his admission of guilt, the confessed
assassin seemed genuinely to have no memory of the crime. What did this mean?
Normally, one would expect a murder trial to sort through these circumstances to
separate fact from fiction. Not in this case.
The trial of Sirhan Sirhan was, from the beginning, a self-conscious event.
“We are aware that this is not just another criminal matter,” said Los Angeles
district attorney Evelle Younger. “The whole world is watching.” So many
newsmen, in fact, attended the trial, that an overflow courtroom had to be
outfitted with video monitors, and those in attendance spoke about the trial in
reverential terms. “A classic of criminal jurisprudence,” intoned Time magazine.
Anticipating, incorrectly, a parallel proceeding against James Earl Ray, The New
York Times said, “both will represent trials of the American system of justice as
much as trials of the men in the dock.”
In the late 1960s, the image of legal authority in America badly needed
affirmation. The country, it seemed, was fracturing along racial and generational
lines. Each week hundreds of young men died in an unpopular Asian war, riots
were increasingly common on university campuses and in the streets of the
nation’s cities, and political murders were occurring with stunning frequency.
For its part, the government appeared powerless to halt the political violence,