A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Lisa Pease
Feral House. 512 pp. $29.95
“As long as there are people who think I didn’t do it, I’ll never admit anything.”
Sirhan Sirhan, during an interview
with journalist Dan Moldea
By Mel Ayton
Since the publication of The Forgotten Terrorist in 2007, Sirhan Sirhan has continued to claim he is innocent of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Another shooter was actually responsible, Sirhan asserts, adding, in contradiction, that he has no memory of the event. He was a “hypnotized assassin” and therefore not responsible.
Sirhan’s defenders chime in that he was not in a position to shoot Kennedy in the head, and thus a second assassin in the pantry must have been culpable. They also say an audio tape recording of the shooting “proves” there was a second gunman.
During these same 12 years, the US media have carefully followed Sirhan’s efforts to persuade the courts and the California Parole Board he should be released, after 51 years of confinement. These news stories, with very few exceptions, have re-propagated the tall tales of conspiracy advocates. One recurring refrain is that of purported “assassination witnesses” who disavow their original testimonies and now support the notion that Kennedy was killed by someone other than Sirhan. It goes without saying that vital evidence to the contrary is always omitted during the breathless presentation of such bogus revelations.[1]
There is no doubt the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) investigation of the assassination was less than optimal. Some possible leads were not exhausted, some evidence was handled incorrectly, and the all-important ballistics investigation was not one for the textbooks.
Yet the same could be said of nearly every major criminal investigation. The likelihood of human error is compounded in high-profile crimes because of the vast amounts of paperwork and physical evidence that must be processed. Anomalies are perhaps the major reason why conspiracy advocates have been able to plant doubt in the minds of the American public, by representing simple or inadvertent mistakes as conspiratorial shenanigans.[2]
Conspiracy advocates have promoted a false history of the RFK assassination (the same as their JFK brethren do) by deliberately skewing evidence in the case to suit their agenda. And unfortunately, in too many cases they have been aided and abetted by gullible journalists who do not know their way around the mountains of evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the LAPD. The media is thereby complicit in leaving the public confused.
These are the six central myths about the Robert Kennedy assassination that have been concocted by conspiracy theorists and given credence by a too-credulous mainstream press:
- Sirhan was never in a position to fire the fatal shot that killed Senator Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of 4/5th June 1968. Conspiracists posit that a security guard positioned behind the senator fired the fatal shot.
- An audio recording of the shooting allegedly recorded 13 or 14 shots being fired in the pantry. If so, this proves there was a second gunman since Sirhan’s revolver held only eight bullets.
- Sirhan was a hypnotized assassin, programmed to kill. He was also programmed to forget who hypnotized him and the circumstances of the shooting.
- Sirhan’s amnesia about the assassination is genuine.
- Sirhan was aided by a “girl in a polka-dot dress,” who was seen with Sirhan in the days before the assassination.
- Sirhan was not interested in politics and therefore had no motive to commit political murder.
The most recent incarnation of these fables appears in A Lie Too Big to Fail, by Lisa Pease. The theories in her book relentlessly recycle just about every fabrication and falsehood conspiracists have managed to dredge up in the five decades since the 1968 assassination, inserting them into public discourse.
