Bobby Kennedy’s assassination is back in the spotlight. Did they have the wrong man all along?

As the Rolling Stones lyric goes, the answer to “who killed the Kennedys” was “after all…you and me”. In Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, John F Kennedy’s assassination emerged from a CIA plot. And in the Ultimate Marvel world, the US president’s killer was, perhaps least credibly of all, Captain America’s son Red Skull.

The assassinations of JFK in 1963 and his brother, Robert F “Bobby” Kennedy, in 1968 have held the American imagination in a vice-like grip ever since.

Conspiracy theories have raged for decades, sparking a plethora of books, films and, more recently, internet posts. For some, no explanation has seemed too improbable. Among many, there remains a reluctance to accept that the simple answers – those to which the bulk of evidence points to – are in fact the correct ones.

After Donald Trump ordered officials to draw up a plan to declassify documents relating to the Kennedys’ assassinations within 15 days, as well as that of the civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, these seismic events will again be thrust into the spotlight.

As he signed an executive order in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump told journalists: “A lot of people are waiting for this for long, for years, for decades. And everything will be revealed.”

During his first presidential term, Trump made public some files relating to JFK’s killing, but agreed to hold back others, citing national security concerns. This time around, there’s an extra plot thread in the Kennedy family story: serving as Trump’s health secretary will be Robert F Kennedy Jr, the son of Democrat senator Bobby and JFK’s nephew.

After signing the order, Trump asked his staff to give the pen he had used to RFK Jr, who has previously said he suspects that the CIA were involved in his uncle’s death. He also disputes the official verdict on his father’s killing by Sirhan Sirhan (convicted and jailed in 1969), arguing there was a second gunman – although other family members reject that claim.

What the unreleased documents might reveal about either assassination is unclear. But Trump’s decision to declassify the documents has raised the spectre of a possible presidential pardon for Sirhan, who has always claimed to have no memory of killing Bobby.

As with the assassination of his older brother, Bobby’s death brought with it a wave of conspiracy theories, including one that suggests Sirhan was hypnotised or brainwashed. There is no consensus on why or by whom.

“Inevitably you will have events that occur that encourage people to think bigger forces are at work, and that’s the way it works,” says Larry Sabato, a professor and the author of The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.

Belief in “bigger forces” is not a minority opinion. Six decades after his death, more than 60 per cent of Americans reportedly believed JFK’s killing involved more than just the single gunman arrested for it, Lee Harvey Oswald.

It’s a view that began to gain currency almost as soon as Oswald shot JFK in Dallas, and was then himself shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days later.

“Everyone assumed it was more than one person [behind JFK’s killing],” says Sabato, who teaches a course at the University of Virginia that covers the assassination.

The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone.“Some people bought it, but the more people started reading [the findings] and the more investigators looked into it and published books about it, the more people started to believe it was a government cover-up,” says Sabato. “That was the operating assumption.”

Among the sceptics was Bobby, according to his son. While publicly supportive of the Warren Commission report at the time, he really thought it was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship,” RFK Jr has said.

As the 1960s wore on, bringing with them the turbulence of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kenedy, followed by the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, the perception grew that “somebody was pulling the strings”.

The JFK assassination theories

So what are the main conspiracy theories surrounding the assassinations of the Kennedys? And what questions remain unanswered?

The “inside job” theory of JFK’s assassination has circulated in various guises from the start. But if it was the CIA, as some believe, then what was their reason? Some suggest the intelligence service was motivated by its anger over the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba.

Other adherents of the CIA theory suggest the agency wanted rid of President Kennedy for not being sufficiently hardline on containing Communism.

RFK Jr, who has subscribed to conspiracy theories on various subjects over the years, has suggested the CIA may have played a part in his uncle’s death. In 2023, he told a podcast that the evidence “overwhelmingly” suggested the agency’s involvement “in the murder and in the cover-up”.

RFK Jr has also repeated false claims about harms caused by vaccines, including the discredited idea that they are linked to autism. He has promoted the conspiracy theory that Covid jabs were developed to control people via microchips, and falsely linked antidepressants to school shootings.

Such theories have been widely debunked. But the old idea that the CIA had a hand in either the assassination of JFK, or in a cover-up of what really happened, has gained traction lately among influencers such as podcaster Joe Rogan, who is popular with a Right-wing audience.

Believers of this theory seem likely to be left disappointed if hoping for new revelations to emerge from the archives.

“If we have organisations that orchestrate these assassinations, do you really think they’d leave evidence around in printed form, or any form?” asks Sabato. “They would have destroyed them ages ago.”

The CIA, perhaps unsurprisingly, has denied playing any part. “While the CIA conspiracy theories make good fodder for movies, they are pure fiction,” Edward Price, a CIA spokesman, told NBC in 2013.

A second popular JFK conspiracy theory says the mob was involved in his death. The mob’s motivation? Possibly, say believers, that his brother Bobby as attorney general was working to stamp out organised crime. It has been suggested that Ruby, in his line of work, could have had links with such criminals.

Another theory centres around the so-called “umbrella man”: a figure in the crowd at Dealey Plaza as JFK’s motorcade passed. Why, ask some, was this man carrying an umbrella on a sunny day? And when he moved it, was he signalling to a co-conspirator perhaps – or even shooting a poison dart into the president’s neck? Neither, actually. The man, identified as Louie Steven Witt, later revealed he had brought the umbrella to heckle the president by referencing the trademark of former British prime minister and Nazi-appeaser Neville Chamberlain.

Were Cuba or the Soviets involved instead, or as well? There is no evidence to suggest so, but fuel was thrown on this particular fire by Oswald’s six-day trip to Mexico City two months before the assassination. This, say some conspiracy theorists, might have been where he received his orders from Cuban or Soviet agents.

“We simply can’t account for most of his time there,” says Sabato. “What we haven’t accounted for is whether he was meeting with people at, say, bullfights [where it would be] easy to make contact and not have to worry about being recorded.”

The Bobby conspiracy

If anything, the various conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination five years later of Bobby Kennedy – just after he won California’s Democratic primary – are even more intriguing. He had just delivered his victory speech when he was fatally shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Sirhan, then 24, a Christian Palestinian from Jordan who had emigrated to the US, was caught at the scene with a gun in his hand, has admitted he was angry at Bobby for his support of Israel and, at his trial, admitted the crime. He has, however, said he does not remember anything about carrying it out.

Some, including members of his legal team, have suggested Sirhan was “hypno-programmed” to shoot Bobby and then had his memories of the assassination erased.

One of the officers who rushed in to tackle him in the moments after the shooting recalled Sirhan had a “blank, glassed-over look on his face – like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind”.

In 2010, his lawyers accused the CIA of hypnotising Sirhan and making him “an involuntary participant”. Lisa Pease, who spent more than two decades researching her book – A Lie Too Big to Fail – on the assassination, has previously stated the intelligence agency may have feared Bobby because he opposed its expansive powers and would likely have pressed the organisation for answers over the killing of his brother.

In the lead-up to his 1969 trial, Sirhan’s defence team explored the angle that he had been hypnotised. They found he could be made to do things without knowing why, including climbing the bars of his cell, but eventually settled on pursuing a diminished mental capacity defence instead.

Sirhan has been denied parole more than a dozen times, most recently in 2023, two years after a review board recommended he be freed, concluding he no longer posed a danger to the public. That decision was overturned in 2022 by California governor Gavin Newsom. Sirhan’s legal team argued at the time that Newsom and a number of Bobby’s relatives opposed to his release had exercised undue influence over the case. Now it is RFK Jr who is in a position of influence. Could that, allied to any new information in government files, finally see Sirhan released?

For unlike many of his relatives, RFK Jr, who was 14 when his father was killed, has said that he does not believe Sirhan killed his father. He has pointed to a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar as the assassin instead, claiming he had a “loathing for the Kennedys” over their support for the civil rights movement and racial equality.

“I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father,” he told the Washington Post after visiting Sirhan in jail in 2017. Four years later, in 2021, RFK Jr claimed he had agreed to meet Cesar in the Philippines in 2018 before the proposed “interview” fell apart after the latter demanded $25,000 to speak.

Those who disbelieve the official explanation point to disputed audio evidence suggesting as many as 13 shots were fired, when Sirhan’s gun held only eight bullets. There have been reports that additional bullet holes were found at the scene, further indicating that more than eight shots were fired. The counter-argument is that these marks were misidentified.

Helping to lend weight to the second shooter theory was the testimony of Dr Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County coroner who performed the official postmortem examination on Bobby. His findings suggested the fatal shot must have been fired from no more than three inches away, contradicting eyewitness testimony about Sirhan.

In 2009, Dr Noguchi told The Telegraph: “Based on the available information, I’m certain there was just one gunman, but I’m also aware that, like theories of the universe, things keep changing.”

RFK Jr has put it far more bluntly: “Records of the case demonstrate that Los Angeles police investigators bullied and badgered eyewitnesses to change their statements regarding the number of shots and to silence those…who reported conspirators dashing from the scene,” he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021.

While the forthcoming release of files is eagerly awaited, “the people mentioned in these documents are almost all dead,” says Sabato. “So I don’t think it will amount to very much.”

Yet, he says, even if nothing significant is revealed: “people will say, ‘I told you, they destroyed everything along the way, they destroyed documents that were incriminating. People will believe what they want to. It will never be over.”

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