EP 197: RFK and the Mysteries That Never Went Away

Ajouté : 2026-06-07

[00:00:22]Hi everyone and welcome back to the George collection. I'm Rachel Right Side Blonde. 56 years ago today, Robert F.

[00:00:28]Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary. He was riding a wave. Most people believed he was going to be the next president of the United States.

[00:00:38]Then he walked through a kitchen pantry and everything changed. Let's start at the beginning.

[00:00:43]Robert Kennedy had just given his victory speech to a ballroom full of supporters.

[00:00:48]By all accounts, the mood was electric.

[00:00:50]He was the front runner, he was the hope, and then he was gone.

[00:00:54]A 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan stepped forward in the hotel's kitchen pantry and opened fire. RFK was struck. Five bystanders were also hit. Kennedy died the following day, June 6th, 1968. He was 42 years old.

[00:01:12]Everyone thought it was an open and shut case, right? Except it isn't, and it never really was. Sirhan carried a standard.22 caliber eight-shot revolver. Eight shots, that's the maximum. When investigators counted the bullets recovered from the crime scene, from bodies, from walls, from door frames, some analyses suggested as many as 13 shots were fired that night. You simply cannot fire 13 shots from an eight-shot gun without reloading.

[00:01:38]And there was no time to reload. Then there's the autopsy. The coroner, Thomas Noguchi, determined that RFK had been shot three times, all from the rear, at a steep upward angle with powder burns indicating the fatal shot was fired at point-blank range, just one or two inches away from his head.

[00:01:55]Here's the problem. Every eyewitness account consistently places Sirhan in front of Kennedy, not closer than 2 ft away.

[00:02:04]So, the fatal shot came from directly behind RFK at nearly contact range, but every witness says Sirhan was in front of him. How do you reconcile that?

[00:02:14]RFK Jr. himself, after visiting Sirhan in prison, said, "The evidence clearly shows that you were not the gunman who shot Robert Kennedy. There's clear evidence of a second gunman in that kitchen pantry."

[00:02:26]>> I don't believe that Sirhan's bullets ever hit my father.

[00:02:30]>> Okay.

[00:02:31]>> And neither did the coroner, Thomas Noguchi, who was probably the most famous coroner in American history, who did an autopsy that is known as the perfect autopsy. He actually flew in the chief coroners of all the military branch, every branch of military service to sit in the surgery theater to watch what he did because he knew what had happened in Dallas, and he didn't want to repeat.

[00:02:55]And what he found, Sirhan had eight shots in a.22 revolver or eight shots in it.

[00:03:02]He fired two shots at my father. The first shot hit Paul Schrade, >> [music] >> who was the UAW, the United Auto Workers deputy chief, who had That was there There was only two unions that supported my father, the United Auto Workers and Cesar Chavez's union. And Paul Schrade had recruited Cesar Chavez to the United Farm Workers. So, he was very close to my dad.

[00:03:25]He got shot in the head.

[00:03:26]And he was okay. And you know, he actually died a year and a half ago and spent the last 20 years of his life trying to get Sirhan out of out of prison, the man who shot him.

[00:03:37]>> Then there's the door frame.

[00:03:39]Photographs taken by the FBI, the LAPD, and the Associated Press show what appear to be bullet holes in a door frame near where RFK's party had entered the pantry.

[00:03:48]Some of those photos show police officers pointing directly at them.

[00:03:52]A hotel waiter testified that officers told him they had dug two bullets out of the center divider. An FBI agent who arrived within hours of the shooting later said he personally observed bullets embedded in the wood. And then the Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames shortly after the trial.

[00:04:09]Sirhan has always claimed to have no memory of the shooting. In fact, he said he was hypnotized during that time and that a second gunman may have come in and delivered the fatal shot. That sounds like the desperate claim of a convicted man and maybe it is. But investigators who have studied the case for decades note that Sirhan's behavior that night was genuinely strange. He seemed disoriented. Witnesses described him as almost robotic. His own defense attorneys didn't deny he was there, but they argued he was in a state of a diminished mental capacity and couldn't have meaningfully premeditated the act.

[00:04:41]>> As the Sirhan seemed to have no memory of the assassination. Sirhan wasn't drunk or on drugs, didn't have brain damage, and didn't appear to be lying.

[00:04:51]Both his defense and the interrogators believed that he was telling the truth to the best of his ability. For Peace, the explanation is, of course, post-hypnotic amnesia. While this wasn't seriously considered during the trial, in no small part because nobody on either side wanted to feed into another candy assassination conspiracy, Peace has no such qualms. She goes on to argue that Sirhan had been placed into an unusually strong trance state [music] through what she calls deep hypnosis, a type of hypnosis where the entranced person supposedly will not remember any of their actions during the hypnotic [music] state and even forget they were put under hypnosis at all, unlike the more common light hypnosis where you remember [music] everything.

[00:05:37]This theory was explored to some extent and it does definitely seem like Sirhan was at the very least unusually susceptible to hypnosis. At one point, Sirhan's defense team actually hypnotized him and found that he was extremely suggestible, entirely forgetting what had happened after waking up.

[00:05:57]Seems like if you were a shadowy group looking to hypnotize some random guy into taking the fall for your political assassination, Sirhan would be the type of [music] dude you'd pick.

[00:06:09]>> Conspiracy theories have persisted for over five decades centered on apparent inconsistencies in the official investigation. Investigative journalist Dan Moldea, who spent years on this case and actually believed a second gunman was involved, ultimately concluded that Sirhan acted alone. That human error and sloppy police work explained the inconsistencies, not a conspiracy.

[00:06:31]That's a serious counter argument, but even he acknowledged that the physical evidence is messy enough that the case was never as airtight as it was presented. Paul Schrade, who was himself shot that night standing near Kennedy, spent years pushing for a new investigation. "I'm interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman," he said. Now, here's where this gets bigger, because this isn't just about one crime scene with missing door frames and contradictory ballistics. RFK's assassination came just five years after his brother. A decade of American leadership struck down. JFK in '63, RFK in June of '68. Each one had an official verdict. Each one has never stopped generating questions.

[00:07:14]>> [music] >> With JFK, the Warren Commission named Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman.

[00:07:18]Then Jack Ruby shot Oswald before he could stand trial. Decades of conspiracy theories followed, and even after the new files were released in 2025, there's really no smoking gun. With RFK, a man was caught at the scene, convicted, and imprisoned, and yet the physical evidence has never been cleanly resolved. We are talking about two of the most significant political killings in American history. And in each case, there are legitimate questions that were never fully answered.

[00:07:45]Evidence that was destroyed, investigations that were closed before they were complete, witnesses who were never called.

[00:07:53]So, what does George magazine have to do with all of this?

[00:07:56]JFK Jr. started George in 1995, and on the surface, he was just trying to make civics cool in the '90s.

[00:08:03]But, there was something deeper going on.

[00:08:05]JFK Jr. published an article in George by filmmaker Oliver Stone about the JFK assassination conspiracy and what Stone called lying history books.

[00:08:14]And in the months before his death, according to this investigator, JFK Jr. was going to shift the focus [music] of George magazine.

[00:08:22]>> Tell me >> Tell me what you want about John F.

[00:08:24]Kennedy.

[00:08:26]>> Well, I uh had so many cross connections.

[00:08:30]Talk about a path never traveled. Was uh JFK Jr. was planning [music] to revamp George magazine into a hard-hitting deep investigation type magazine.

[00:08:42]In 1999, I was approached by a friend of mine who was in touch with JFK Jr., and we had co-written some articles for the Village Voice.

[00:08:49]>> [music] >> And he said, "Hey, how would you like to go work for JFK Jr. at his George magazine?"

[00:08:54]>> [music] >> And I had a had an interview scheduled with JFK Jr., and uh he was going to interview four or five people for a similar number of positions, including myself and my friend.

[00:09:06]And it was a Saturday morning. I'll never forget it. I was on I was driving on my way to Crystal City for an appointment, and I had the radio on. The bulletin came across that his plane was missing. It hadn't arrived in Martha's Vineyard, and uh I knew right away they they took him out. Because he was getting ready to run for the Senate from New York in 2000. That was the seat that eventually went to Hillary Clinton.

[00:09:28]And later, a few years after that, the guy who was his flight instructor, who was an international airline pilot, contacted me to say, "I need to tell you what know about that crash." He said it wasn't a crash. He was an excellent pilot. I was supposed to be his co-pilot that Saturday, but I had an international flight. But, I said he was okay to go. And I said, "How come you contacted me? How did you" "Cuz I hadn't really written anything about this JFK connection and what and what he was going to do with George." He said, "Well, he told me that he was going to hire you."

[00:10:01]Obviously, it wasn't an interview. He'd already made up his mind. And he said, "I'll tell you what he was going to do.

[00:10:06]He was going to hand you and the other guys he was going to hire envelopes with some new evidence he he had gotten from someplace as a launch point to go forth and find out who killed his father.

[00:10:17]You know, JFK Jr. had the money. He certainly had the looks. And he had the he had the connections where he could have been a in the Senate undoubtedly in 2008.

[00:10:28]He would have run for the presidency in a second term as as a senator. And I think we would have President John F.

[00:10:33]Kennedy the second.

[00:10:35]>> Think about what that means. The son of a murdered president, a man who had grown up watching the official version of his father's death be questioned from every direction, was using his own magazine as a platform to quietly, carefully begin pulling on that thread.

[00:10:50]Along with the rumor that he hired this private investigator, there are rumors he was going to come out with a lot of that information. Now, it's hard to verify any of that. But, if that's the case, that's very interesting timing.

[00:11:01]JFK Jr.'s cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our current HHS secretary, has been outspoken about all of this. He believes the CIA was involved in his uncle's death. He visited Sirhan in prison and came away convinced a second gunman fired the fatal shot at his father. And he has said publicly that George magazine could have been used to expose what he called CIA crimes and that powerful forces feared what JFK Jr.

[00:11:24]might eventually publish. Now, you can believe that or you can dismiss it.

[00:11:29]That's totally up to you. But, here's what isn't undeniable. The official investigations into both Kennedy assassinations left significant physical and forensic questions unresolved.

[00:11:39]Evidence was destroyed. Key witnesses weren't heard. And the men convicted, one of whom was killed before trial, one of whom says he has no memory what he did, never got to tell the full story in open court.

[00:11:51]We may have to come to terms that we may never fully understand what really happened. The physical evidence that might have settled some of these questions was literally destroyed. What we can say is this. America has a habit of closing the books on its most consequential crimes before all the pages have been read.

[00:12:09]And then it wonders why, generation after generation, those questions keep coming back.

[00:12:14]JFK, RFK, and then a son who launched a magazine named George, and started quietly asking the same questions his father never got the chance to ask before he too was gone.

[00:12:27]The official answers exist, and the truth is out there. The truth is the truth.

[00:12:32]But, will we ever get to know the full truth when it comes to JFK and RFK?

[00:12:37]That does it for this episode of The George Collection. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great week, and I will see you next time.

[00:12:59]>> Of this extraordinary magazine, George, which is a hoot of a magazine. I thought you were a lawyer. [music] >> I was.

[00:13:06]>> What happened?

[00:13:07]>> Well, we uh we decided, uh I mean, actually taking a cue from >> [music] >> from folks like yourself and you around the 1992 election, that that there was an opportunity here to [music] uh change the definition of a political magazine.

[00:13:22]Uh certainly the way Americans were uh accessing information about politics and politicians [music] was changing.

[00:13:29]Uh Uh, candidates were appearing on late night talk shows, on talk radio, on sitcoms, >> [music] >> uh, and there was a a kind of a leveling process and while the rest of media clearly had caught up with that, we felt that political magazines [music] per se hadn't.

[00:13:45]>> Your mother was a hell of an editor at Doubleday.

[00:13:47]>> It's only here.

[00:13:48]>> Would she have liked George?

[00:13:49]>> I think she [music] would have.