Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

In a Los Angeles courtroom in 1969, a slight 24-year-old man stunned the judge by trying to withdraw his not guilty plea, plead guilty to first-degree murder, and demand the gas chamber. The judge refused and forced a full trial. This episode traces the life of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the man who assassinated United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.We follow him from a childhood in Mandatory Palestine and Jordan, marked by witnessing his brother's death, to Pasadena, a failed dream of becoming a jockey, and an obsession with Kennedy fueled by the senator's pledge to send fighter jets to Israel. We examine his notebooks, the diminished-capacity hypnosis defense, the commuted death sentence, and decades of denied parole hearings that turned a lone gunman into a fixture of enduring conspiracy.How early trauma in the Arab-Israeli conflict shaped Sirhan's worldviewThe spiral-bound notebooks and the symbolic June 5th deadline tied to the Six-Day WarThe chaotic scene in the pantry, subdued by Rosey Grier, Rafer Johnson, and George PlimptonThe 1972 California ruling that commuted his death sentence to lifeWhy members of the Kennedy family became divided over his parole