(Conservative Playbook)—Robert Kennedy Jr. has consistently claimed that Sirhan Sirhan, imprisoned for nearly six decades for the 1968 assassination of his father, Sen. Robert Kennedy, is not the true killer, pointing instead to a second gunman. This stance has caused a rift with most of his siblings and their late mother, Ethel, and is likely to resurface as Sirhan, now 81, may face parole again in 2026.
“I believe Cesar killed my father,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in a 2021 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, referring to security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, who died in 2019 without ever being charged. “Sirhan,” he added, “is not my father’s killer.”
Documents declassified by the Trump administration recently revealed that Kennedy Jr., now the US health and human services secretary, wrote to then-US Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012, urging a new investigation into his father’s death and the two-gunman theory. In 2021, when Kennedy Jr., 71, supported Sirhan’s parole at his 16th hearing, six of his siblings, backed by their mother, condemned the recommendation.
“Our family and our country suffered an unspeakable loss due to the inhumanity of one man,” Ethel wrote 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 died on Oct. 10, 2024, at 96. Her children Joe, Courtney, Kerry, Chris, Max, and Rory oppose Sirhan’s parole, while Douglas aligns with Kennedy Jr. in supporting it. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, in a 2018 Washington Post interview, noted that Kennedy Jr. “makes a compelling case” for Sirhan not acting alone but has not spoken on it since.
Kennedy Jr.’s 2012 letter to Holder included a three-page “Summary of Evidence for the New Investigation” by Paul Schrade, a former RFK confidant and labor leader wounded in the 1968 shooting at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. Schrade, shot in the head by Sirhan, spent decades advocating for the two-gunman theory.
“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 to Holder. “I agree and support his request for a new investigation.”
Schrade, who died in 2022 at 97, cited “new forensic tests on a journalist’s audiotape recorded during this crime and found in the FBI’s files” in his own July 29, 2012, letter to Holder. An acoustics expert claimed the tape revealed 13 shots fired, while Sirhan’s .22-caliber Iver Johnson revolver held only eight bullets and was not reloaded, Schrade noted. He also highlighted the autopsy report showing RFK was shot from behind, despite eyewitnesses placing Sirhan in front of him.
“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,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in an August 27, 2021, letter to the California 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.”
Kennedy Jr. pointed to Cesar, a security guard that night, as a suspect, noting: “Cesar 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.” He added that the Los Angeles police never examined Cesar’s gun and that Cesar, who worked at Lockheed with high-security clearance, “acknowledged a loathing for the Kennedys and their race-mixing sympathizers.”
Sirhan has repeatedly stated he cannot recall the events of the assassination. Recently released files, disclosed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, included threatening notes found in Sirhan’s Pasadena, California, bedroom, such as: “My determination to remove RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakeable obsession.”
The 2021 parole hearing exposed family tensions, with sources telling The Post that one side “double-crossed” the other. Despite an agreement to abstain from statements, Sirhan’s lawyer, Angela Berry, received a letter from the parole board via the LAPD the night before the hearing, stating: “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,” Berry told The Post in 2021. “I got ahold of him right away letting him know what happened.”
Kennedy Jr. quickly wrote a letter supporting Sirhan’s release, which nearly missed the hearing. “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.”
