What RFK Jr. actually believes about his father’s assassination — and how it’s torn the Kennedy family apart
Robert Kennedy Jr. has long maintained that Sirhan Sirhan, who has spent nearly 60 years in prison for killing his father, is innocent of the crime — and that a second gunman was involved in the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy in 1968.
That belief has fueled division between him and the majority of his siblings as well as their mother, Ethel, when she was alive. And it’s sure to heat up again as Sirhan, 81, could be eligible for parole again next year.
“I believe Cesar killed my father,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in a 2021 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed of security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, who died in 2019 and was never charged. “Sirhan,” Kennedy Jr. wrote, “is not my father’s killer.”
It was revealed Wednesday that Kennedy Jr., the current US health and human services secretary, sent a letter to then-US Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012 requesting a new investigation into his father’s death and the two-gunmen theory. The letter to Holder, who served under President Barack Obama, came to light in documents on the assassination declassified by the Trump administration.
When Kennedy Jr., 71, recommended to the California Board of Parole Hearings that Sirhan be given parole in 2021 — the 16th time he faced the board — six of his siblings, led by their mother, slammed the move.
“Our family and our country suffered an unspeakable loss due to the inhumanity of one man,” said Ethel in a Sept. 7, 2021, post on her daughter Kerry Kennedy’s X account — adding: “He should not have the opportunity to terrorize again.”
Ethel passed away on Oct. 10, 2024, at age 96.
Her children Joe, Courtney, Kerry, Chris, Max and Rory have opposed Sirhan’s parole. Son Douglas, like Kennedy Jr., is in favor.
Daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend told the Washington Post in 2018 that Kennedy Jr. “makes a compelling case” about Sirhan not acting alone, but has not commented on the matter since.
Kennedy Jr.’s 2012 letter to Holder included a three-page “Summary of Evidence for the New Investigation” compiled by Paul Schrade. A former labor leader and confidant of RFK, Schrade was among five people wounded in the fusillade of bullets that resulted in Kennedy’s death at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel following his Democratic presidential primary victory in California.
Schrade, who was shot in the head by Sirhan during the melee, spent years trying to prove his theory that there were two gunmen involved in the assassination.
“Paul and his team of nationally prominent attorneys including former US Attorney Rob Bonner strongly believe this new evidence is conclusive and requires a new investigation,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in his letter to Holder. “I agree and support his request for a new investigation.”
The request was based on “new forensic tests on a journalist’s audiotape recorded during this crime and found in the FBI’s files,” said Schrade in his own letter to Holder dated July 29, 2012.
An acoustics expert who examined the recording maintained that 13 shots were fired. Sirhan fired all eight shots from his .22-caliber Ivar Johnson revolver and did not reload, said Schrade in his letter to Holder.
Schrade, who died in 2022 at age 97, also pointed to the autopsy report that showed that RFK was shot from behind. Eyewitnesses said Sirhan had stood in front of the candidate.
“I have been a strong advocate for the release of Mr. Sirhan B. Sirhan since I learned of evidence that was not presented to the court during his trial,” said Kennedy Jr. in an August 27, 2021, letter to the Board of Parole Hearings. “After years of careful investigation, I arrived at the conviction that the story of my father’s murder was not as cut and dried as portrayed at trial.
“While Sirhan clearly fired shots at my father, overwhelming evidence suggests that these were not the shots that took his life.”
Cesar, hired as a security guard for the night, “was in the exact position to fire the shots as described in the autopsy. Three witnesses saw him draw his gun — which he later admitted — and?one said she saw him fire it,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in 2021. “The Los Angeles police never bothered to examine the gun. Cesar, who was moonlighting that night from his high-security clearance job at the Lockheed plant, acknowledged a loathing for the Kennedys and their race-mixing sympathizers.”
Sirhan has consistently maintained that he does not recall the events that took place on the day of the assassination.
Other recently released files on the assassination released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revealed numerous menacing handwritten notes in Sirhan’s bedroom in the Pasadena, Calif., home he shared with his mother and three siblings.
“My determination to remove RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakeable obsession,” read one of the scribbled notes included in the file.
When Sirhan was up for parole in 2021, the Kennedy family fight over his impending release led to one side “double-crossing” the other, inside sources told The Post at the time.
The family members against Sirhan’s release had promised that they would not make a statement to the parole board, sources told The Post.
“The night before the hearing I got a letter from the parole board via the LAPD,” Sirhan’s lawyer Angela Berry told The Post in 2021. “It read, ‘On behalf of the Kennedy family, we oppose the release of Sirhan.’ [Kennedy Jr.] had been staying out of it specifically on the assumption that his family was going to stay out of it … I got ahold of him right away letting him know what happened.”
In response, Kennedy Jr. stayed up late writing a letter in favor of Sirhan’s release that barely made it into the hearing, sources said.
“The parole hearing started at 8:30 a.m. and Robert’s letter streamed in at 10:30 a.m.,” Berry said. “It read in part, ‘I have to assure you that the letter you got is not on behalf of the whole Kennedy family.’ That was the very last thing the hearing officer read into the record.”
