R.F.K. MUST DIE!"": A History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination and Its Aftermath

by Robert Blair Kaiser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 1970

Free-lance reporter Kaiser really got inside this story, becoming, by his persistence and his promise to provide funds for Sirhan's legal defense through his writing, a participant-observer on the defense team. This gave him access to FBI and police files, numerous opportunities to interview Sirhan and sit in on his sessions with the chief defense psychiatrist, and such an intimate acquaintance with all aspects of the assassination that the defense attorneys came to rely on him ""as the chief repository of knowledge about the case."" Kaiser spares the reader little of that knowledge in this lengthy accounting of the assassination, the investigation, and the trial, and of his and psychiatrist Bernard Diamond's tape-recorded probings of the troubled psyche of Sirhan Sirhan (including analysis under hypnosis). Kaiser remained unsatisfied with the simple answers--""either that Sirhan was crazy or that he killed Kennedy to keep the United States from sending fifty jets to lsrael""--and with the police and FBI investigations. He finally comes out with his own conclusions: there were some co-conspirators, ""some witting, some all too unwitting."" The unwitting accomplices were the angry blacks and other militants whose revolutionary rhetoric and verbal violence had a disproportionate influence on Sirhan's ""tabula rasa"" mind. But Kaiser suspects Sirhan was used more directly, almost in Manchurian Candidate fashion, by unknown sinister persons (Sirhan had experimented with the occult and mind control and was quite susceptible to trances). He piles up all the elusive bits of evidence suggesting shadowy background figures, accomplices in the flesh (there's still that girl in the polka-dot dress), and possible payoffs. Much of this interpretation seems uncertainly grounded in Kaiser's speculations about ""the sick, complicated mess that Sirhan was"" and unduly colored by his admitted proneness ""to believe that political assassinations happen because people plan them."" But with his impressive grasp of all the loose ends and unturned stones along the way, Kaiser stakes out a strong claim as the Mark Lane of this second ""rush to judgment.

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION