Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (65 page)

Daniel Ellsberg, the young defense intellectual who had broken from the government to advise Kennedy on Vietnam, was in Chicago, attending a conference on the war, when a friend told him to turn on the TV set in his hotel room. “Bobby’s been shot,” she told him. He sat on his bed as he watched the horrible images from Los Angeles, his chest heaving uncontrollably. All his hopes had been on Bobby. “I was thinking: Maybe there’s no way, no way to change this country.”

Later, after flying back home to Los Angeles, Ellsberg took a long walk on the Malibu beach. Bobby’s funeral train was moving slowly down the tracks from New York to Washington, past the same crowds—white and black, young and old—who had once swarmed his motorcades, but were now standing as somber sentinels to salute him one last time. The train was filled with Kennedy’s comrades, but Ellsberg didn’t want to be on it. He wanted to be as far away as he could. As he watched the waves roll onto the Malibu shore, he dropped some LSD that a neighbor had given him. “I wanted to be on the moon, I wanted to be away from everything.”

Some of the Kennedy team would drift away altogether from liberal politics. “After Bobby was shot, the lights went out for me,” said Fred Dutton, who had dedicated nearly eight years of his life to the Kennedy cause, but later became a Washington lobbyist. When Dutton died in June 2005, the
Los Angeles Times
would note in his obituary that his disillusionment with politics after the second Kennedy assassination “helped explain to many why the unabashedly liberal Mr. Dutton…later agreed to represent the conservative Saudi Arabian government.”

Dick Goodwin stayed in politics for awhile, rejoining the McCarthy campaign, although he knew it had no hope, and drafting the doomed peace plank at the 1968 Democratic Convention—a gathering that, instead of uniting party warhorses like Mayor Daley and the antiwar movement as RFK’s nomination would have ensured, pitted them violently and disastrously against each other. Afterward, Goodwin dropped out of the action. “Dick went kind of nuts after Bobby’s murder,” Newfield told me before his death. “He moved up to Maine and invited me up there to do rifle practice. He told me, ‘They got my friends, but they’re not going to get me.’ He had a dark view of the whole thing.” Today, Goodwin makes light of the rifle practice but confirms that he was in a bad way. “I had to get away. I was very disturbed by what happened.”

For the Kennedy circle, once again, the world was off its axis, and this time the country seemed an even more strange and threatening place. On Bobby’s funeral train, Jacqueline Kennedy—so stoic after Dallas—threw herself on his coffin, sobbing, “Oh, my God, oh, my God.” It was McNamara who finally calmed her down, grabbing her and holding her in his arms. Later, her sorrow turned to bitterness. “If they’re killing Kennedys, then my children are targets,” she said. “I want to get out of this country.” She would soon find a way, by marrying Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

John Frankenheimer too would flee the country, moving to Europe for five years, drinking heavily and largely ignoring his movie career. That night at the Ambassador sent him to a dark place, the director later recalled. “If you want to date a moment when things started to turn, it was after that night. I went through sheer hell. I went to Europe, and I just lost interest. I got burned out. I was really left very disillusioned and went through a period of deep depression. It took a long time to get it back.”

Bobby Kennedy himself would have scorned this feeling of alienation, Adam Walinsky contends today—this growing dread that America was lost. “He would have had no tolerance or patience for such a sentiment. His reaction would have been, ‘What do you mean we’ve lost America? It’s a great country—are you telling me the whole heritage of Washington and Lincoln and everything that Americans and their ancestors have done is all going down the drain because I’m not around? What the fuck is the matter with you? Grow up, get to work, cut that out!’”

But Bobby was no longer there to rally his family and fellow warriors. The flag carrier they had always looked to had been carried from the field. JFK’s death had been cataclysmic. But they still had Bobby. For years, after Dallas, he had been the one they looked to, the one who kept the mission alive. His disappearance left a final void.

There was also no Bobby to hunt relentlessly for the truth about what happened in those chaotic moments at the Ambassador Hotel. And so the men who had followed him grappled privately with their suspicions, and many never reached a satisfying conclusion about his death. Some thought Sirhan Bishara Sirhan—the luckless young Palestinian immigrant who was arrested and convicted of the murder—was the whole, pathetic story. Others thought the assassin, who seemed in a trance that night, was programmed—or that he was not the only shooter, perhaps even a decoy. Ironically, Sirhan had brushed by Frankenheimer during Kennedy’s victory speech, as the director stood watching Bobby on a TV monitor in the ballroom’s archway. “It was
The Manchurian Candidate
,” Frankenheimer later said. “I felt this shaking inside me.”

As pandemonium swept through the pantry that night, Jesse Unruh, the powerful California politician and Kennedy supporter, had shouted, “We don’t want another Oswald!”—urging the enraged crowd that swirled around Sirhan not to kill him. But for many people in the Kennedy circle, that’s precisely what that night at the Ambassador would become—another Dallas, with the same type of mysterious gunfire, murky characters, and shockingly inept investigation.

Mankiewicz and Hamill were among those who accepted the official version of Robert Kennedy’s death—that Sirhan alone put an end to everything that night. While both men strongly suspected that JFK had been the victim of a conspiracy, they believed that Bobby simply had been dispatched by “a pimply messenger…from the secret filthy heart of America,” in Hamill’s disgusted words. This was the anguished, metaphorical way that the American liberal media generally reacted to RFK’s murder. As time went by, Hamill would see the convicted assassin in less symbolic terms. Sirhan was the kind of Palestinian extremist you would later find blowing up cafes in Israel, Hamill says today. “It just seemed weird at the time because we didn’t know anything about Palestinians.”

But others who were in the Ambassador pantry when the shots rang out were deeply disturbed by what they witnessed. They could never reconcile their observations with the official version of Kennedy’s killing. Gunpowder burns found on Kennedy’s right ear during the autopsy indicated the fatal shot was fired directly behind his head, from a distance of only three inches or less. But not one witness saw Sirhan shoot Kennedy in the back of his skull at point-blank range. According to witnesses, Sirhan attacked Kennedy from the front, and he was standing between three and six feet away from his victim.

Frank Burns, a lawyer and aide to Jesse Unruh, was standing at Kennedy’s right shoulder when the gunfire erupted. He was among those who jumped on Sirhan, who held on to his gun like a man possessed while much bigger men wrestled to disarm him. “There is no question that Sirhan was trying to assassinate Kennedy,” Burns told me. “But I don’t believe that Sirhan’s gun got within a couple of inches of Kennedy’s head, as the powder burns showed. So I’ve never been able to reconcile that. And I was standing right there. Now Kennedy
could
have circled completely around into the muzzle of the gun while we were waltzing with Sirhan—but I didn’t hear any other shots while we were wrestling with him.

“In the years since Bobby’s assassination, every conspiracy researcher in the world has called me up, from Dan Rather on down. But what it all comes down to for me is that the official story is just not believable—nor are other explanations and theories for who could have killed him. It’s still an unsolved mystery in my mind.”

Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Robert Kennedy, came to the same unsettling conclusion—though it received surprisingly scant attention when he revealed this in his 1983 memoir. Disturbed by the gunpowder evidence, eyewitness testimony, and indications that twelve bullets were fired that night—more than Sirhan’s eight-bullet revolver could hold—Noguchi wrote that it “all seemed to indicate there may have been a second gunman,” speculating that Sirhan’s role might have been to divert attention from Kennedy’s principal assailant. The coroner acknowledged that “crowd psychology” during moments of mayhem like the night at the Ambassador often made eyewitness testimony unreliable. Nonetheless, Noguchi wrote, “Until more is positively known of what happened that night, the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.”

Richard Lubic, the Kennedy media consultant, did see another drawn gun that night. He too was standing next to the senator as he was shot. As Lubic kneeled down to help the fallen Kennedy, he saw a security guard with a gun in his hand, pointed toward the floor. The guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, was standing behind Kennedy when he was shot. He later insisted he did not fire his gun that night, but police never tested it. And Cesar—who held strong anti-Kennedy, racist views, telling one interviewer that the Kennedys had “sold the country down the road…to the commies” and minorities—has long since figured in conspiracy theories about RFK’s death.

After the assassination, Lubic was visited at his home by members of Special Unit Senator (SUS), the Los Angeles police task force set up to investigate the crime. To Lubic, the investigators from SUS, which had ties to U.S. intelligence, seemed like “government people.” When he tried to tell them about Cesar—asking them, “Why would a security guard have his gun pointed toward the floor, instead of at Sirhan?”—they cut him off. “It’s none of your business,” the investigators told Lubic. “Don’t bring this up, don’t be talking about this.” Later, at Sirhan’s trial, Lubic was never questioned about the mysterious security guard.

Frank Burns discovered the same lack of curiosity when he was called to the witness stand. He was never asked about the position of Sirhan’s gun. “Everybody was certain they had the right guy—Sirhan was convicted before the trial ever began,” Burns said. “I had felt the same way until I began to see some of the evidence about the bullet holes and trajectories and so on.”

Within weeks of RFK’s death, questions began to emerge about the LAPD investigation, including charges of destroying evidence and intimidating witnesses. “Big Daddy” Jesse Unruh, California’s most formidable Democrat, was disturbed by what he was hearing about the investigation, and he alerted the Kennedy family. But irreparably broken by the death of Bobby—who, even more than Jack, had been the heart of the family—the Kennedys were in no condition to focus on the mysteries of the case. According to Burns, “Unruh talked to Kenny O’Donnell and Steve Smith. He told them we had some questions about the investigation in L.A. And he wanted to know if they had any concerns and if they had anything they wanted us to pursue. If the family had been troubled by any concerns, Jess would have been willing to do whatever he could to look into them. After all, he had a lot of clout, he was the California Speaker. But the answer came back from the Kennedy camp: ‘No, we don’t want to pursue it.’ The family’s attitude was clearly, ‘Thanks for your concerns, but please butt out.’”

Ted Kennedy was now the head of the family, but he lacked Bobby’s burning sense of political mission—nor did he have his brother’s investigative drive. Family members became consumed by their own private torments. No Kennedy would take up Bobby’s secret quest to solve Jack’s murder, and none would dedicate himself or herself to ensuring justice for Bobby.

Allard Lowenstein, the bespectacled whirling dervish of liberal activism, made the RFK assassination a cause until his own strange murder in 1980 by one of his former political protégés. And, over the years, various lawyers for Sirhan tried without success to reopen the case. But, overshadowed by the JFK mystery, Bobby’s assassination received scant media scrutiny.

WITH JOHN KENNEDY’S DEATH
had come the birth of Camelot—endless TV specials and magazine spreads on the dashing, storybook king and his tragic, inexplicable end. With Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the Kennedy Curse was born—countless media ruminations on the once charmed family’s dark fate. This gauzy coverage had the effect of making the double killing of the Kennedy brothers seem like something preordained, something the family had brought upon itself like characters in a Greek tragedy.

Ted Sorensen tried to counter the creation of the Kennedy Curse. At a memorial service held at his New York law firm the day after Bobby’s death, he delivered an eloquent tribute to the fallen brothers. John and Robert Kennedy were killed not because they were cursed, Sorensen declared, but because they dared to change history. “There is no curse upon the Kennedys,” Sorensen told his colleagues. “They have met their share of ill-fate because they had more than their share of the courage and the conviction required to dare and to try and to tempt fate…. They died heroic deaths because they lived heroic lives.”

As time passed, it became clear that the curse was not on the Kennedy brothers. It was on America. Years would go by, and no new leader would appear to take the country to the same heights.

“We’ve been on an endless cycle of retreat ever since the Kennedys,” Goodwin remarked. “A retreat not just from liberal ideals, but from that sense of excited involvement in the country. I was asked by a magazine once what I thought John Kennedy’s greatest contribution was, and I said, ‘He made us feel that we were better than we thought we were.’ That was the big loss. There’s so much a president can do to inspire a nation—it’s hard to even remember that nowadays. I mean JFK just liberated an enormous energy in the country. And Bobby would have done even more, I think.”