A Conspiracy That Isn’t

The media mock RFK, Jr. relentlessly on vaccines, but breathlessly boost his debunked theories on his father’s murder.

By Craig Colgan and Mel Ayton
The Washington Examiner, March 21, 2021.

It has been a busy 2021 for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In January, he took heat for asking if baseball star Henry Aaron’s sudden death could be Covid-19 vaccine related, as Aaron was vaccinated several weeks before he died. In February, to the frustration of his 800,000 followers, Kennedy was thrown off Instagram for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” as Instagram parent Facebook explained it. And earlier this month Kennedy was called a racist for producing a film that exploits the history of black Americans’ medical fears to urge avoiding all coronavirus vaccines. 

And while RFK, Jr. may be best known as America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic, scrutinized, fact-checked, canceled and mocked regularly, it is his focus on a repeatedly resurrected conspiracy tale that the media for some reason not only never fact checks but habitually reinforces. 

Over the next few months, RFK Jr. will be back in the news addressing the legacy of the 1968 murder of his father—the attorney general, Fidel Castro hunter, senator and presidential candidate. The 16th parole hearing of convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan, serving life in prison, is set for Aug. 27  in California. The son says the father’s murderer is innocent. He is not.

The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, Netflix and other mainstream outlets who should know better have for some reason led a media resurgence in recent years boosting pro-conspiracy claims that somebody other than Sirhan, the Jordanian-American who saw himself as a Palestinian, murdered Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel ballroom kitchen. Surrounded by dozens of people. Sirhan firing every single round from his .22 pistol, including several while being tackled, wounding five others and striking Kennedy three times. Twice in the armpit as Kennedy was raising his right arm in a defensive motion, and once in the head. Kennedy died a day later.  

Why the media seem to refuse to see the truth about this aging, thoroughly investigated case is not complicated. Silly tales of dark conspiracies draw eyeballs and viewers. A new generation, the first to have its views amplified globally in seconds via social media, is more conspiracy-friendly and spends hours daily scrounging the web for clickable shock to share. Knowing half the story is now the standard. Ask Woody Allen. The victim’s son coming out in support of his father’s killer, as RFK Jr. did in 2017, after visiting Sirhan in prison in San Diego, served as fuel to several major media projects supporting Sirhan that soon followed. 

The case for conspiracy that RFK Jr. touts goes like this: Another shooter, behind the senator, fired the fatal shots, even as Sirhan fired away madly in front of the target, to distract all from the real killer, apparently. Junior points to an autopsy report that says the shots came from behind and closer to Kennedy’s head than the three feet which most witnesses say is the distance between Sirhan and RFK. 

But try this: Stand three feet in front of someone. Now extend your arm. How close are you now? Then lean in. What happens if in such a situation the target twists and turns and falls to the floor? Did the shots “come from behind”? 

This is the level of argument put forth by the Sirhan-is-framed crowd. 

As hotel employee Vincent DiPierro told The Washington Post’s Ronald Kessler in 1974, Sirhan was indeed standing about three feet in front, and slightly to the right, of Kennedy. But a moment before Sirhan whipped out his handgun, Kennedy turned to his left to greet several people. As Sirhan began firing, he lunged forward, bringing the muzzle of his Ivor-Johnson revolver to within inches of the rear-right of Kennedy’s head. “It would be impossible for there to be a second gun,” Di Pierro told Kessler. “I saw the first shot. Kennedy fell at my feet. His blood splattered on me. I had a clear view of Kennedy and Sirhan.” DiPierro repeated his story in 2018.

A security guard behind Kennedy has been for decades pointed to by conspiracists, including RFK Jr., as their main suspect. But consider: How would such a plot really work? In the real world? Just who would agree to be the guy who saunters up behind the target, knowing that the hypnotized decoy shooter in front will be firing in your direction, as you at the precise same moment squeeze off at least three precisely timed shots, not be seen, not to be identified or questioned at the scene, and then simply walk away as if invisible? The guard in question was interviewed later that night after he approached police and declared himself a witness. Years later he would endure a polygraph administered by Edward Gelb, a former president and executive director of the American Polygraph Association who had over 30 years experience in the field, via Washington, D.C. author Dan Moldea. And pass it. 

And why would such a conspiracy even be necessary, given that one person was obviously so willing to empty a gun directly at the target? 

A Washington Post under much different management from the Ben Bradlee era of the 1970s seriously considered in 2018 whether Sirhan was hypnotized by … somebody to shoot Kennedy. Somehow. In recent years, CNN and other TV outlets focused on an audio recording that purported to be of the shooting itself and to have revealed too many shots were fired than could fit into Sirhan’s gun. But this claim was debunked as better acoustic analysis was brought to bear. The popular Netflix doc “Bobby Kennedy for President” from several years ago devoted an entire episode to the shooting, farcically laundering the views of Paul Schrade, an RFK-supporting union official who was wounded by a Sirhan shot. Schrade, whom RFK Jr. credits with talking him into believing Sirhan’s innocence, showed up at Sirhan’s last parole hearing in 2016, haranguing the parole board for an hour about how the man before them did indeed shoot Schrade. But is somehow absolutely innocent of shooting Kennedy.

Confused yet?

There are convincing reasons, however, to feel empathy for Junior and some of his views. Across multiple issues.

Such as: Social media canceling solves what, exactly? Thorough debunkings of the worst of RFK Jr.’s ideas are a couple clicks away. The mob is now calling for Facebook and Twitter to off his head next, including think tanker Darrel West of the Brookings Institution, who pleads for his further banning. And Kennedy’s common targets lately have been Anthony Fauci and big pharma. Raise your hand if you think Americans could benefit from more scrutiny of both. Further, Kennedy has brought serious focus to the continual and mysterious opposition to various Covid-fighting generics and therapeutics, targeted seemingly as part of some sort of ideological storm. Tell us your political party, and we will tell you your position on Ivermectin.

But among those who have argued against conspiracy explanations are some lately who are quietly considering supporting for the first time some sort of controlled, humane release for Sirhan. As was done with John Hinckley, Jr., the shooter of President Ronald Reagan, a police officer and a Secret Service agent in 1981. Sirhan will turn 77 two days before his hearing. That release would have to include several provisos: Sirhan must acknowledge he had been lying about the shooting. He should be restricted from benefiting financially from his crime. He should also be prevented from traveling to the Middle East. Sirhan, who murdered Kennedy for various pathetic personal reasons but mostly because of RFK’s support for Israel, has been praised over the years by terrorist groups, and we can imagine the scenes of cheering Palestinians if he ever was allowed to go to the West Bank. (Sirhan may also benefit this time by the arrival in December of George Gascon, the George Soros-backed radical Los Angeles County prosecutor imposing a slew of transformational policies on charging and sentencing. Including: Prosecutors are no longer allowed to attend parole hearings. And prosecutors must “reevaluate and consider for resentencing people who have already served 15 years in prison.”)

It has been Sirhan’s lawyers over the decades who are responsible for keeping Sirhan in prison. If Sirhan had simply abandoned his defense—no memory of the shooting, which Sirhan himself with his big mouth has actually disproven regularly over the years—the parole boards would have been much more sympathetic to his solicitations. As The Forgotten Terrorist and Moldea’s work have shown, Sirhan has certainly demonstrated multiple times over the years in interviews, writings and outbursts that he is lying about not remembering the shooting.

Now, about Henry Aaron, who died at age 86. The Fulton County, Ga. Medical Examiner’s Office attributed Aaron’s death to “natural causes.” Major media then attacked RFK Jr. for questioning whether Aaron’s death might have been related to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine he received 17 days earlier. But Kennedy later reported that the Medical Examiner’s office denied directly to him that anyone there even saw Aaron’s body, and told Kennedy that it did no postmortem investigation on the case. That was too much for Instagram, for some reason, which promptly banned RFK, Jr. But it seems reasonable to actually ask why a fuller explanation was not forthcoming earlier from authorities on the Aaron death. The media spending their time attacking Kennedy, Jr. will doubtlessly get right on this.

Craig Colgan is a Washington-based writer. Mel Ayton is the author of The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (published by Potomac Books).