Assassination of Robert Kennedy

[Gerry Hemming]

Early next morn, drove my B & W to Sirhan Sirhan's mother's house -- parked in front, and walked towards the open front door.

Gerry: YOu sure turn up at the strangest of places. What possessed you to visit the home of Sirhan's mother? (If I may be so bold as to ask).

Gerry's visit to Sirhan's mother's house is interesting. On this thread, Gerry has described being in a black & white on the way to the Ambassador Hotel when the report of the shooting came over the radio. I believe that he mentioned elsewhere being in a safe house at the time of RFK's murder.

T.C.

--------------------------------

Maybe you can point me in the direction where I "mentioned" that I was "...in a safe house at the time of RFK's murder..."!

And please spare me from some "quote?" from the Khazar Weberman's bullxxxx scribblings !! Or anybody else's misrepresentations and wet-dreams !!

GPH

_____________________

[Tim Carroll]

I believe that he mentioned elsewhere being in a safe house at the time of RFK's murder.

Maybe you can point me in the direction where I "mentioned" that I was "...in a safe house at the time of RFK's murder..."!

I haven't been able to find it, and given Gerry's response, it's likely that I was misremembering or misunderstanding the safe house remark. I used qualified language, but I probably shouldn't have said anything without finding the quote (again, which may not exist in the appropriate context). I apologize.

T.C.

[Guest John Gillespie]

Tim,

It is interesting if not compelling to note that, according to Dick Russell's time line listed toward the back of "TMWKTM", Mr. Nagell was in Europe, in prison and virtually incommunicado. That's my little contribution for now.

Regarding some of these things, we make of them what we will. Still, I would like to see a pursuit of that particular angle. Keep swingin'

Regards,

John Gillespie

[Guest John Gillespie]

Owen,

Just getting around to dealing with dated material...I want to recommend "The Senator Must Die" by Robert Morrow regarding the RFK assassination. I believe it! There also are many references, some of them tangential, to the level of knowlege among LBJ's cronies, however speculative to some extent.

JG

[Tim Gratz]

Just saw an excellent show on the RFK assassination on the History Channel.

I learned a lot (but I have not read a lot about the RFK case). None of the material may be new to students of the RFK case but I would recoomend purchasing a copy of the show (I think it is available on VHS).

[John Simkin]

Here is William C. Sullivan's account of the death of Robert Kennedy (The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI, 1979):

Although Hoover was desperately trying to catch Bobby Kennedy red-handed at anything, he never did. Kennedy was almost a Puritan. We used to watch him at parties, where he would order one glass of scotch and still be sipping from the same glass two hours later. The stories about Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were just stories. The original story was invented by a so-called journalist, a right-wing zealot who had a history of spinning wild yarns. It spread like wildfire, of course, and J. Edgar Hoover was right there, gleefully fanning the flames.

When Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for the presidential nomination in 1968, his name came up at a top-level FBI meeting. Hoover was not present, and Clyde Tolson was presiding in his absence. I was one of eight men who heard Tolson respond to the mention of Kennedy's name by saying, "I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch." This was five or six weeks before the California primary. I used to stare at Tolson after Bobby Kennedy was murdered, wondering if he had qualms of conscience about what he said. I don't think he did.

On 6 June 1968, the Los Angeles office called me at about two o'clock in the morning to tell me that Robert Kennedy had been killed. I had the damn phone in my hand, half asleep, and I asked the agent to repeat what he'd said. And then I woke up, really woke up.

There was another tremendous investigation of course, and we did finally decide that Sirhan acted alone, but we never found out why. Although he was fanatic about the Arab cause, we could never link Sirhan to any organization or to any other country. He never received a dime from anyone for what he did. We sometimes wondered whether someone representing the Soviets had suggested to Sirhan that Kennedy would take action against the Arab countries if he became president. But that was only a guess.

There were so many holes in the case. We never could account for Sirhan's presence in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Did he know Kennedy would be walking through? Intelligence work is exasperating. You can work on a case for years and still not know the real answers. There are so many unknowns. Investigating Sirhan was a frustrating job, for in the end we were never sure.

Hoover's dislike of Robert Kennedy continued even after Kennedy's death. We had a positive identification on James Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King, Jr., a full day before Hoover released the news to the world that he had been caught in London. He purposely held up the report of Ray's capture so that he could interrupt TV coverage of Bobby's burial, on June 8.

Hoover was as fond of Ted Kennedy as he had been of his brothers. It was the FBI which circulated the story that Teddy Kennedy was a poor student and had cheated on an exam. By rights the FBI should have had nothing to do with the Chappaquiddick affair, but the Boston office was put on the case right away. Although Hoover was delighted to cooperate, the order did not originate with him. It came from the White House.

Everything that came in on Kennedy and on Mary Jo Kopechne, the unfortunate young woman who drowned in his car, was funnelled to the White House. Hoover even assigned our local agent to dig into the affair. The White House asked Hoover to make the assignment and Hoover jumped through the hoop to do it.

[Thomas Graves]

The preeminent race track near San Diego, by the way, is Del Mar, which is, in fact, very glamorous. Del Mar was where Hoover and his mobster friends would vacation every year, courtesy of the track's owner, Texas Oilman Clint Murchison. For most of the fifities, Hoover and his friend Clyde were comped at Murchison's hotel, the Hotel Del Charro, where they would rub elbows with the likes of Frank Costello by the pool.

____________________________________

Pat,

You are both right and wrong.

You are correct in saying that "The preeminent race track near San Diego... is [the] Del Mar [Turf Club] [in Del Mar, California].

However, Murchison's Hotel Del Charro (closed for the last few years and recently razed to the ground for some sort of development), where Hoover and his boyfriend Tolson stayed every summer during the Del Mar racing season, was in the luxurious, glamorous, coastal community of La Jolla which is twelve miles north of downtown San Diego and about ten miles south of the community of Del Mar.

I should know-- I was raised in L.J.

--Thomas

P.S. My dad told me that he once saw Hoover and Tolson together at the races in Del Mar.

____________________________________

[John Simkin]

There is an article about the assassination in today's Guardian. It is not very good but it does include an interesting interview with Paul Schrade:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featur...1989146,00.html

Paul Schrade was a director of the United Auto Workers union and a close associate of Robert Kennedy. Aged 43 at the time, he was one of five people other than Kennedy to be shot that night

I hadn't intended to go to the Ambassador - I never liked smoke-ridden, boozy victory parties - but I was driving home and heard on the radio we were behind and Bobby was projected to lose. I felt that if it was going to be bad news, I'd better be there to help out.

So I went to the Ambassador and up to Bobby's hotel room. When he went downstairs to make his victory speech, I stayed behind to get him the details of a supporter he wanted to thank, and then followed behind. I was on the platform with him when he made his speech, and he called me to join him as he left the stage. He should have gone off to the right to another room full of supporters, but instead turned left to talk to press reporters, passing through the pantry.

As we entered the room, he stopped to talk to some kitchen staff. Then I started shaking violently. There were a lot of TV cameras in the room and I thought I must have been electrocuted. It felt just like that - an electric shock. In fact, I was going into shock and I blacked out seconds later. When I came round, I was lying on the floor and it felt like I was being trampled on. A doctor came and said I was going to be all right.

It was only the next night or following day - I forget which - that I learned Bobby had died. And later it emerged that his last words had been, 'Is Paul OK? Is everybody all right?'

At the hospital I was told that a bullet had gone into the centre of my head, two inches above the hairline and passing through the first layer of skull. The doctor said any farther and that would have been it.

The police account of events was that the bullet went through Robert Kennedy's jacket and then into my head. I've always challenged that version as I was a few feet from Bobby, and for that account to hold true I would have had to have been right above him because the gun was pointed almost vertically.

My wounds healed over time, but I felt anger and sadness after Bobby's death. I left LA soon after the shooting and went to live in a desert area - I was just filled with anger. Here was the best candidate we ever had. It was a terrible loss to his family, and the country, and to me.

Here we are today in a parallel situation: the same rampant poverty, and yet another ugly and unnecessary war. It has been a long time since June 1968, but I'm still angry and sad, and still trying to be hopeful in our struggle for peace and social justice.

[Sid Walker]

There is an article about the assassination in today's Guardian. It is not very good but it does include an interesting interview with Paul Schrade:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featur...1989146,00.html

Paul Schrade was a director of the United Auto Workers union and a close associate of Robert Kennedy. Aged 43 at the time, he was one of five people other than Kennedy to be shot that night

I hadn't intended to go to the Ambassador - I never liked smoke-ridden, boozy victory parties - but I was driving home and heard on the radio we were behind and Bobby was projected to lose. I felt that if it was going to be bad news, I'd better be there to help out.

So I went to the Ambassador and up to Bobby's hotel room. When he went downstairs to make his victory speech, I stayed behind to get him the details of a supporter he wanted to thank, and then followed behind. I was on the platform with him when he made his speech, and he called me to join him as he left the stage. He should have gone off to the right to another room full of supporters, but instead turned left to talk to press reporters, passing through the pantry.

As we entered the room, he stopped to talk to some kitchen staff. Then I started shaking violently. There were a lot of TV cameras in the room and I thought I must have been electrocuted. It felt just like that - an electric shock. In fact, I was going into shock and I blacked out seconds later. When I came round, I was lying on the floor and it felt like I was being trampled on. A doctor came and said I was going to be all right.

It was only the next night or following day - I forget which - that I learned Bobby had died. And later it emerged that his last words had been, 'Is Paul OK? Is everybody all right?'

At the hospital I was told that a bullet had gone into the centre of my head, two inches above the hairline and passing through the first layer of skull. The doctor said any farther and that would have been it.

The police account of events was that the bullet went through Robert Kennedy's jacket and then into my head. I've always challenged that version as I was a few feet from Bobby, and for that account to hold true I would have had to have been right above him because the gun was pointed almost vertically.

My wounds healed over time, but I felt anger and sadness after Bobby's death. I left LA soon after the shooting and went to live in a desert area - I was just filled with anger. Here was the best candidate we ever had. It was a terrible loss to his family, and the country, and to me.

Here we are today in a parallel situation: the same rampant poverty, and yet another ugly and unnecessary war. It has been a long time since June 1968, but I'm still angry and sad, and still trying to be hopeful in our struggle for peace and social justice.

I wonder if anyone else on the forum has come across this rather interesting article in the Barnes Review?

I've copied the text below for convenience.

Usually, I'd be disinclined to give much credence to an anonymous story. However, this narrative , for me, hasthe ring of authenticity.

What do others think?

___________________________-

I Was There When Robert F. Kennedy Died

By Anonymous

Irish-American Robert F. Kennedy liked to wade—“movie star style”—through cheering crowds during his 1968 presidential campaign. However, the night he was shot, Kennedy suddenly and abruptly changed his traditional pattern and exited the ballroom where his adoring supporters were gathered and instead left through a rear door into an adjoining kitchen where one or more assassins lay in wait. Here’s a first-hand account of the events of that fateful evening that may explain why Kennedy inexplicably altered his long-time habit of greeting his admirers and walked into an ambush.

In late May and early June of 1968 I was working with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign in Oregon and California in his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. I was on the staff of Bill Wilson, the New York and Hollywood producer, who handled production for the campaign. Wilson’s headquarters was set up at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard There was a large suite at the Chateau where contractors, subcontractors, and other production people met to plan strategy and discuss business. The campaign was in full swing with people working long hours, juggling multiple jobs, and doing whatever had to be done to keep production moving forward. There were vegetables, fruits, and snack foods always available but little time for meals.

Senator Kennedy had just returned from Oregon, where he campaigned to win over Oregon Democrats opposing Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.). Reinvigorating himself after his speaking tour, RFK told reporters to turn off the cameras. He jumped into the cold Pacific and swam a good mile or so out to sea and back. Topnotch videotape producers such as Jack Cox and film producers such as Jerry Syms prepared clips for distribution to TV stations to be aired that evening. I was tasked to distribute videotape to different cities in Oregon. Timing was precise. I flew from LA to key Oregon cities including Medford, Salem, Eugene and Portland. By advance arrangement, personnel from the TV stations met me at the airport, collected the videotapes, and I hopped a plane on my way to another city. Everything went like clockwork and without a flaw.

When I arrived at campaign headquarters in LA the mood was upbeat. Though McCarthy defeated Kennedy in Oregon the real prize was California and the campaign team felt invincible. They were on a roll and working well together. Everyone thought that if RFK could take California he would win the presidency. In fact some of the insiders were already making plans to take the campaign all the way and begin campaigning against Nixon immediately after California.

Now the momentum was on to take California. The producers completed their footage and then edited and re-edited until Bill and the campaign bigwigs were satisfied with the results. There was a film of RFK on the train and of RFK giving speeches throughout California. His charisma was contagious as the crowd hung onto his every word. Film and video didn’t do him justice. Like a well-oiled machine, production kept rolling along. Finally the day arrived for the Democrats of California to vote for their nominee. The polls closed and the votes started coming in.

Everything was looking good for “Bobby.” Though exhausted many people associated with production went to the Ambassador Hotel for the victory speech. The plans were to meet with RFK after his speech at “The Factory,” a discotheque. After arriving at the Ambassador people were buzzing about RFK and how he had just saved his son’s life. He and his son were at Hollywood producer John Frankenheimer’s house in Malibu. RFK’s son was caught in a rip tide and carried out to sea. Bobby dove in and rescued him. At the time we weren’t sure which son he saved. But he achieved hero status and everyone was on a “high.” What could possibly go wrong? A few people voiced their concern, afraid he might be assassinated like his brother. But no one wanted to think about that during this victory celebration.

Rooms on the fifth and sixth floors were used for the campaign. I was headed for an elevator to go to the Ambassador ballroom when I passed Ethel Kennedy, standing alone by the wall obviously pregnant, looking tired and tense. I caught up with the campaign’s press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, and some of his people. One of them asked me if I would sit with Bobby in a hotel room while he was interviewed by a local radio station prior to giving his speech. He said Bobby liked to be with other people, to have an audience when doing radio interviews. There were half a dozen of us who agreed to be the audience. All of the major networks except for NBC conceded victory for RFK. It bothered Bobby that NBC had not conceded. He was smoking a cigar and looking around at the people while the interviewer focused on that point. Along with other staffers I was seated close to Kennedy and the interviewer. In no time the interview was over.

We departed with RFK and while walking toward the elevators people were talking about how he would leave the Ambassador Hotel after the speech. RFK wanted to walk through the crowd rather than go out a back door. I was told he felt comfortable and safer doing that.

It made sense that he could do this when I saw that less than half the ballroom was filled with people. The ballroom could have been filled because there were many more people wanting to get in who were in the lobby and outside. When I asked why more people were not allowed in the ballroom I was told it was for “security” purposes. There were guards by the ballroom doors.

Bobby felt that it “looked good” (in televised media re ports) to have cheering crowds surrounding him in his moment of victory. In fact, during that campaign, it was almost a tradition that cheering RFK supporters would practically tear his shirt off in their enthusiasm, to the point that Bobby was known to wear inexpensive shirts with the expectation that they would eventually be torn and ruined by screaming admirers.

RFK gave a rousing victory speech and when he started to finally leave the ballroom, I was surprised to see him turn around and start walking through the kitchen door, even though I was sure that he would go out through the ballroom. Clearly someone or something influenced him to alter his normal procedure of going through the crowd. His decision to leave through the kitchen was alien to his nature.

I was standing close to the kitchen door but not close enough to see the actual shooting itself. There were hundreds of balloons floating around the ceiling. It sounded like the balloons were popping when I heard people saying there were gunshots. There were a lot of shots. A man standing close to me had blood on his face.

I looked around for the guards but they were standing by the doors, not making any move. I ran to the guard closest to me and told him that there were shots being fired. He told me that he thought I was trying to trick him into leaving his post so that I could let friends in from the lobby.

I tried to think of a way to convince him there was a problem. So I told him whether there were people shooting or not that many people believed there were gun shots and that there could be a stampede and people could get hurt. I insisted that he had better do something and check it out.

He finally moved. I went into the lobby area and told someone who looked like a hotel official to call an ambulance as there were people hurt. I went back into the ballroom. People were milling all around I worked my way through the crowd to a door that led through some offices into the kitchen. RFK was on the floor surrounded by his wife and others. The CBS cameraman fainted. Working with the grip, one of the producers grabbed the camera and kept filming everything going on in the kitchen. By this time he had completed seven trips to Vietnam as a film producer inventing most of the portable hand-held equipment used for filming in places such as Vietnam. He had worked for CBS at one time and knew this footage would be valuable and historical. He never stopped filming until RFK was taken away. There were five other people shot and bleeding.

The waiter brought ice and I helped get ice to the injured. The ambulance attendants finally got to RFK after what seemed to me like a long time Surprisingly, the attendants plopped him in a wheelchair. I couldn’t figure out why they would put any man with head injuries in a wheelchair and roll him out like that.

As they wheeled him out, his head and arms were so limp that it looked like all life was out of him. I couldn’t see how he could survive. Later when I learned the doctors were still working with him at the hospital I was surprised he lived for as long as he did.

I walked back to the ballroom with others who had been in the kitchen. We saw sports legends Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson walk out with Sirhan Sirhan between them. His eyes looked like they were rolling around in his head. It looked like he was on something, perhaps some sort of drug. He didn’t look normal. It didn’t look like he had his wits about him to shoot straight. In fact, in a lot of published evidence that has since come out, there is good reason to believe that Sirhan was under some sort of “mind control”—either through drugs or hypnosis. Sirhan himself has said that he has no actual memory of being in the kitchen at the time Bobby was shot.

At the time, though, I heard people say Sirhan had a gun and was shooting but never got close enough to Kennedy to shoot him at point blank range. There seemed to be too many bullets going off at one time for one man to shoot six people.

Something wasn’t right in my mind or in the minds of others around me. A producer and I looked at the bullet holes in the frame around the door. There were too many bullet holes for one man to have fired, to have come from a single gun. Later with the final “official” analysis on RFK’s assassination it looked like a story to fit another cover up that didn’t make sense but would be fed to the American people as fact. It looked too much like another “magic bullet” that was purported to have been fired by Lee Harvey Oswald at JFK in Dallas.

Later, after events began to wind down, I remembered the strange incident where Frank Mankiewicz was insistent that Bobby leave through the kitchen, rather than the ballroom. I discreetly asked others who had campaigned with him for a long time if it made any sense that Bobby would leave through the kitchen rather than through his crowd of supporters and they all said RFK preferred to walk through a crowd after a speech. Neither at the time—nor for many years afterward—did I mention the incident that I witnessed, nor did I see any published accounts anywhere explaining why Bobby went through the kitchen.

However, some years ago, when Michael Collins Piper was writing his book, Final Judgment, about the JFK assassination, which also featured a chapter on Bobby’s assassination as well, people suggested to me that I tell Piper about the incident and he did describe it in his book when it was finally published. Later, I was very intrigued to learn, from Piper, that Mankiewicz had written an article for Washingtonian magazine, describing his last days with Bobby Kennedy. In that article Mankiewicz described how he had insisted that Bobby leave through the ballroom but that Bobby had said, instead, that he wanted to leave through the kitchen. That was not the conversation that I heard, nor, as I noted, was it consistent with Bobby’s previous pattern nor was it consistent with the pattern that had been witnessed by other longtime RFK campaign workers.

In his book, Final Judgment, Piper points out that Mankiewicz started his career as a public relations man for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith in Los Angeles—an interesting point since Piper’s book contends that Israeli intelligence played a part in the assassination of both President Kennedy and Senator Kennedy.

And now, adding fuel to the fire of Piper’s allegation, independent RFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease has come forth with evidence, for example, that a British national of Jewish origin, Michael Wien, who went by the name of “Michael Wayne,” was in the Ambassador ballroom before the shooting and seemed to have had advance knowledge of the impending assassination.

Later, after the shooting, there were allegations that Wien (or “Wayne”) was carrying what appeared to some to be a cardboard tube or some similar item and some people thought he had a gun concealed inside. Although the police apparently took Wien into custody for a brief period, Pease suggests that there are many more questions about Wien—and other suspicious individuals who were there that day—that remain unanswered.

Pease seems afraid to mention a possible Israeli or Zionist connection and has even excised previous references to the work of Piper from a republished version of one of her earlier-published essays on the Kennedy assassinations that appears in her new book (co-edited with James DiEugenio), The Assassinations (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003). With good reason, she is evidently afraid of being tarred with the same smear of “anti-Semitism” that has been leveled at Piper. However, her revelations seem to confirm at least some of what Piper has written on the topic and certainly add new dimensions to what I personally witnessed that tragic day when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.

[Sid Walker]

Frank Mankiewicz, incidentally, has a fascinating cv.

Wikipedia - at present - simply doesn't do it justice.

Surprising really, because Mankiewicz has been busy throughout his long career.

According to Michael Collins Piper, Mankiewicz's early career in PR involved working for the ADL.

He was RFK's press sec in 68 - then McGovern's Campaign Manager in 72.

By 1983, Frank joined PR giant Hill & Knowlton and held the post of Vice Chairman until recently.

In his own words: "I have a very favored position here. I can do almost anything."

While he can't be blamed for Hill & Knowlton's infamous work on behalf of big tobacco in the 50s, he may have had a little more to do with the stunts pulled by H&K in the run up to Bush Snr's assault on Iraq.

Hill & Knowlton organized testimony given to Congress about Kuwaiti babies being ripped out of incubators by Saddam Hussein's thugs (client: Kuwaiti Government). This testimony, it later transpired, was a blatant falsehood.

some of the most impressive spin maneuvers and disinformation campaigns occurred during the Gulf War in 1991, the lessons of which are particularly pertinent as the US again gears up.

Most notorious was the work of PR giant Hill & Knowlton (H&K) (for which current Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke worked after she was an aide to John McCain and Bush's dad). Subsidized by the Kuwaiti royal family, H&K dedicated 119 executives in 12 offices across the country to the job of drumming up support within the United States for the 1991 war. It was an all-out grassroots blitz: distributing tens of thousands of "Free Kuwait" T-shirts and bumper stickers at colleges across the US and setting up observances such as National Kuwait Day and National Student Information Day. H&K also mailed 200,000 copies of a book titled The Rape of Kuwait to American troops stationed in the Middle East. The firm also massaged reporters, arranging interviews with handpicked Kuwaiti emissaries and dispatching reams of footage of burning wells and oil-slicked birds washed ashore.

But nothing quite compared to H&K's now infamous "baby atrocities" campaign. After convening a number of focus groups to try to figure out which buttons to press to make the public respond, H&K determined that presentations involving the mistreatment of infants, a tactic drawn straight from W R Hearst's playbook of the Spanish-American War, received the best reaction.

So on October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill at which H&K, in coordination with California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. (Purportedly to safeguard against Iraqi reprisals, Nayirah's full name was not disclosed.) Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Allegedly, 312 infants were removed.

The tale got wide circulation, even winding up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council. Before Congress gave the green light to go to war, seven of the main pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations as a major component of their argument for passing the resolution to unleash the bombers. Ultimately, the motion for war passed by a narrow five-vote margin.

Only later was it discovered that the testimony was untrue. H&K had failed to reveal that Nayirah was not only a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, but also that her father, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, was Kuwait's ambassador to the US. H&K had prepped Nayirah in her presentation, according to Harper's publisher John R MacArthur, in his book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. Of the seven other witnesses who stepped to the podium that day, five had been prepped by H&K and had used false names. When human rights organizations investigated later, they could not find that Nayirah had any connection to the hospital. Amnesty International, among those originally duped, eventually issued an embarrassing retraction.

When asked if it acknowledges the incubator story as a deception, H&K's media liaison, Suzanne Laurita, only responded: "The company has nothing to say on this matter." Pushed further on whether such deception was considered part of the public relations industry, she reiterated, "Please know again that this falls into the realm that the agency has no wish to confirm, deny or comment on." Years later, Scowcroft, the national security adviser at the time, concluded that the tale was surely "useful in mobilizing public opinion".

Mankiewicz also served as President of National Public Radio for six years.

[Sid Walker]

More links worth checking out which consolidate and amplify the case that Israeli black-ops were involved in RFK's assassination:

1/ A brief article on the Xymphora blog: 'The girl in the polka dot dress'

2/ WHO WAS THE GIRL IN THE POLKA DOT DRESS?

3/ The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress: New Light on the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Carl Wernerhoff. (in PDF format)

Edited January 14, 2007 by Sid Walker

[Mark Stapleton]

Very interesting, Sid.

I've always been suspicious of Sirhan's alleged motive. It seems as false as Jack Ruby's motive. How could Sirhan be worried about a sharp American foreign policy shift towards Israel when LBJ's Middle East policy already strongly favored Israel--to the extent of ordering a total coverup of the USS Liberty incident as well as massively increasing US military support for Israel over the previous five years?

If US foreign policy had been even handed in 1968, then Sirhan's fears may have been credible, in that he may have believed shooting RFK might have saved US policy from swinging Israel's way.

The anonomous article is interesting, especially the references to Mankiewicz and Wayne. I've never fully acquainted myself with the minutiae of RFK, JFK is complicated enough. I've a feeling that in the unlikely event that one of these crimes is solved, the other will quickly follow.

On the Xymphora site, the following comment is made:

The two organisations FBI/ADL co-operated again a few weeks later when they arranged for the execution of two of the principals involved in the successful operation to purge America of its last great progressive politiian.

Do you know to whom they were referring?

[Sid Walker]

On the Xymphora site, the following comment is made:

The two organisations FBI/ADL co-operated again a few weeks later when they arranged for the execution of two of the principals involved in the successful operation to purge America of its last great progressive politiian.

Do you know to whom they were referring?

Tarrants and Ainsworth

The case is set out in the lengthier references, such as The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress: New Light on the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

What is not discussed - presumably for lack of evidence - is the manner in which Tarrants and Ainsworth were (allegedly) drawn into the plot to kill RFK, although a case is made they were both potential assassins who match the descriptions of people observed at the murder scene.

[Sid Walker]

...today people who are sympathetic to the goals and ideology of the racist right may be trying to spread misinformation about the Robert Kennedy assassination, arguing that not only was it a "black op" of Israeli intelligence, but that RFK's press secretary, the Jewish Frank Mankiewizc, was involved in setting up Robert Kennedy for the murder. While the allegation against Mankiewizcis is pathetic and ridiculous enough, we should note that this is being spread by people who would have been sympathetic to the very people who most would have wanted Robert F. Kennedy out of the way in 1968.

Are you implying that the Barnes Review folk are sympathetic to COINTELPRO?

Or to the Ku Klux Klan and violent racist whites?

That's drawing rather a long bow, Daniel, from my observation of the contents of that journal.

You may not like Barnes Review (I have little doubt you don't).

But have the decency to charactize its views with accuracy.

Edited January 16, 2007 by Sid Walker

[Sid Walker]

Here's an extract from The Crime Library's account of the RFK assassination mystery, showing LA police assigned to the case were desperate to downplay the significance of the "Girl in the Polka Dot Dress".

The evening of the murder, police interviewed Vincent DiPierro, a college kid and part-time waiter at the Ambassador Hotel, who said he had spotted Sirhan Sirhan before the shooting, standing near the tray table. What had drawn his attention to the would-be assassin was the woman to whom he was whispering. DiPierro thought she was quite attractive, despite a small pug nose. She had brown hair and blue eyes and wore a "white dress with black or purple polka dots". Moments before Sirhan leaped forward to shoot, he murmured in her ear and she smiled.

That same night at the police station a 21-year-old campaign worker named Sandra Serrano also told the investigators about a mysterious polka dot-wearing lady. Having gone out for some fresh air, Serrano found sanctuary on the steps that led down from the ballroom to the street. At about 11:30 p.m., she said, a trio comprised of a young couple and a young male who looked like Sirhan Sirhan ascended the steps from the parking lot and entered the ballroom. The woman wore a polka-dot dress. Not long after, claimed Serrano, the couple, minus the third party, came bolting down the steps, exuberantly crying, "We shot Kennedy!" When the police asked her for a more accurate description of the dress and the woman who wore it, the witness replied, "white dress with polka dots (and she had) a funny nose."

Sandra Serrano

(California State Archives)

That wasn’t all. The polka-dot lady had also been seen by a police sergeant named Paul Sharaga. He had been cruising on-duty near the vicinity of the Ambassador when he heard a radio report about a shooting at the hotel. Turning his squad in that direction, he parked it in the adjacent lot and ran inside. But as he reached the sidewalk outside, already in clamor, he overheard a giggling couple pass by him, mumbling, "We shot Kennedy!" The female wore polka dots. By the time it dawned on him what was going on, they had disappeared into the darkness. Sharaga immediately radioed their description into headquarters.

The LAPD discounted the strange tales. Says Manny Pena, SUS chief investigator, "I found no credence that there was a gal in a polka-dot dress who said, ‘We shot Kennedy’. What (we believe they all) heard was, ‘They shot Kennedy’…If we didn’t dispel that, we could still be looking for the gal."

But, why the LAPD never saw "credence" in a matching story related by three unrelated people – including a policeman – was never explained. Nor was it explained why any innocent person would laugh when they heard someone was shot.

Because Serrano was the most adamant about the existence of the phantom lady, she was turned over to a Sgt. Enrique Hernandez for in-depth questioning on the topic. The interview lasted more than an hour and, badly shaken from the almost-accusatory nature of the interview, she took and failed a polygraph (lie detector) test. Here is a segment of the actual transcript, which is taken from Dan E. Moldea’s The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy:

HERNANDEZ: I think you owe it to Senator Kennedy, the late Senator Kennedy, to come forth, be a woman about this…Don’t shame his death by keeping this thing up. I have compassion for you. I want to know why. I want to know why you did what you did. This is a very serious thing.

SERRANO: I seen those people!

HERNANDEZ: No, no, no, no, Sandy. Remember what I told you about that: you can’t say you saw something when you really didn’t see it …

SERRANO: Well, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong…I remember seeing the girl!

HERNANDEZ: No, I’m talking about what you have told here about seeing a person tell you, ‘We have shot Kennedy.’ And that’s wrong.

SERRANO: That’s what she said.

HERNANDEZ: No, it isn’t, Sandy…

SERRANO: No! That’s what she said.

HERNANDEZ: Look it! Look it! I love this man!

SERRANO: So do I.

HERNANDEZ: And you’re shaming (him)…!

SERRANO: Don’t shout at me.

HERNANDEZ: Well, I’m trying not to shout. but this a very emotional thing for me, too…If you love the man, the least you owe him is the courtesy of letting him rest in peace.

When questioned by reporters about the brutal interrogation tactics practiced on the girl by Hernandez, the police defended them as normal routine.

Right or wrong, the police did seem to snuff the polka-dot controversy expediently, critics all agree.

Yet it seems an initial police report indicates she whe was a key suspect, possibly in custody - see THIS