Central to the psychiatric testimony that followed were two sets of psychological tests given to Sirhan -- the first, in July, by Dr. Orville Richardson at the request of Dr. Eric Marcus, the court-appointed psychiatrist; the second, in November, by Dr. Schorr. The results were then reviewed by five clinical psychologists and four psychiatrists, including Marcus, Pollack, and Diamond.
Sirhan was described as a paranoid schizophrenic by all except Dr. Pollack and Dr. Olinger, on the prosecution side. Pollack said Sirhan was a paranoid personality but not as severely ill as a schizophrenic. Dr. Olinger said Sirhan was suffering from pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia.
The prosecution psychiatrists also questioned the validity of the Rorschach inkblot test. According to Kaiser, "one of them said, remarkably, 'Everyone in the Middle East can take the Rorschach and they all come out as paranoid schizophrenics, so what does that prove?'"
***
The psychiatrists' testimony was punctuated by recordings of Sirhan's time in custody being played into the court record. Bizarrely, Cooper entered these recordings into evidence but did not play the tape of Sirhan reenacting the shooting for Diamond under hypnosis -- to my mind, the strongest indication that he had been programmed.
"During the trial, I wanted Grant Cooper to at least tell the jury this was a possibility," recalls Kaiser, "and show various clues that Sirhan was, in fact, not himself that night, that he might have been acting under some other influences, even programmed under hypnosis. Dr. Diamond had put Sirhan under hypnosis at least a dozen times and we had tape-recorded all of those hypnotic sessions, so those could well have been shown to the jury and let the jury make up its own mind. Cooper decided, 'Hey, they're never going to believe that and I'll look like a laughingstock, it's an incredible theory, let's drop it.' So that was a huge disappointment for me during the trial."
Even Dr. Diamond was loath to attribute Sirhan's programming to another. "Dr. Diamond shied away from that theory, that Sirhan was a 'Manchurian Candidate,''' said Kaiser. "And I'm not sure why -- I think because he didn't want to look silly."
Instead, Dr. Diamond took the testimony of the psychologists to conclude that Sirhan was, in fact, a paranoid schizophrenic. After describing in great detail his six sessions with Sirhan, he summarized his conclusions in court:
The combination of events which led to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy ... I think started with Sirhan's exposure to violence and death in Jerusalem in 1948, and it continues with his immigration to the United States, the development of his mental illness in which his whole personality altered and he became preoccupied with revolution, violence, destruction, paranoid fantasies of glory, power and becoming the savior of his people.
As his delusional fantasies grew bolder, and his fanatical hatred and fear of the Jews increased with each radio and television broadcast concerning the tension in the Middle East ... Sirhan was withdrawing into a ruminative, brooding, isolated sense of failure and insignificance. To improve his mind and to gain control, he hoped, over his personal destiny, he read mystical books and subscribed to ... Rosicrucian correspondence courses in self-hypnosis and mind power.
He practiced his lessons diligently to the point where he became frightened by his own magical, supernatural powers of concentration. He actually believed that he could stop the bombers from reaching Israel and thereby save the Arabs, simply by willing the death of all who would help the Jews. His experiments in inducing the magical trances worked better than he realized -- they worked so well that they frightened Sirhan and convinced him that he was losing his mind ....
He sought the remedy in his books on mysticism and the occult, and he daydreamed of the power of his gun, taking every opportunity on many different days to shoot it, firing hundreds and hundreds of shots as if each shot would somehow make up for his ever growing sense of helplessness, impotence and fear of loss of self-control.
With absolutely no knowledge or awareness of what was actually happening in his Rosicrucian and occult experiments, he was gradually programming himself ... for the coming assassination. In his unconscious mind, there existed a plan for the total fulfillment of his sick, paranoid hatred of Kennedy and all who might want to help the Jews. In his conscious mind, there was no awareness of such a plan or that he, Sirhan, was to be the instrument of assassination.
It is my opinion that through chance, circumstances, and a succession of unrelated events, Sirhan found himself in the physical situation in which the assassination occurred. I am satisfied that he had not consciously planned to be in that situation, that if he had been fully conscious and in his usual mental state, he would have been quite harmless, despite his paranoid hatreds and despite his loaded gun.
But he was confused, bewildered and partially intoxicated. The mirrors in the hotel lobby, the flashing lights, the general confusion -- this was like pressing the button which starts the computer. He was back in his trances, his violent convulsive rages, the automatic writing, the pouring out of incoherent hatred, violence and assassination. Only this time, it was for real and this time, there was no pencil in his hand, this time there was only the loaded gun.
I agree that this is an absurd and preposterous story, unlikely and incredible. I doubt that Sirhan himself agrees with me as to how everything happened ....
Sirhan prefers to deny his mental illness, his psychological disintegration, his trances, his automatic writing and his automatic shooting .... Sirhan would rather believe that he is the fanatical martyr who by his noble act of self-sacrifice has saved his people and become a great hero ... ready to die in the gas chamber for the glory of the Arab people.
However, I see Sirhan as small and helpless, pitifully ill, with a demented, psychotic rage, out of control of his own consciousness and his own actions, subject to bizarre disassociated trances in some of which he programmed himself to be the instrument of assassination .... Then, in an almost accidentally induced twilight state, he actually executed the crime, knowing next to nothing [of] what was happening .... I am satisfied that this is how Sirhan Bishara Sirhan came to kill Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968.
***
Fitts's cross-examination of Diamond was spiky and filled with mutual disdain. "You go along with me so far?" asked Fitts, at one point. "Well, I hear your words," replied Dr. Diamond.
To Fitts, Sirhan was lying when he said he didn't remember the shooting or the notebooks. He suggested that Mary Sirhan had magnified the "horrors of war and the effect on her son in hopes that they will have some impact on this jury and your psychiatric opinion."
"I don't think it is possible to magnify the horrors of war on children," said Diamond; "my daughter, son and granddaughter live in Israel ... and I am fully aware of what the conditions are. I don't feel they were exaggerated."
***
Fitts suggested that Sirhan had simply made up his story from newspaper reports and talking to the defense team, deciding in advance what he would remember and what he would forget.
"Well, no, that was the difficulty," responded Diamond. "He was talking in ways which to me seemed very strange. He was admitting information which certainly would not help him, and was concealing information which might help him; so there seemed to be no logical rhyme or reason to his stories.
"He was quite prepared to admit to me or anybody who would ask him that he had killed Senator Kennedy; that he hated Senator Kennedy; and that he had done this to prevent Senator Kennedy from getting elected to the Presidency and sending fifty bombers to Israel. ... This did not impress me as a sociopath who is inclined to help himself by concealing his crime .... What he wouldn't talk about were all of these things which were related to his psychological state and that I regarded as mental illness."
"Did Sirhan have a true amnesia at the time he shot Kennedy?" asked Fitts.
"I think this was a true amnesia for the time he shot Kennedy .... He does not remember in his conscious state the shooting of Kennedy. He does remember in hypnotic state." But hypnosis merely accessed unconscious thoughts in his mind, explained Diamond, so it was possible the memories under hypnosis were influenced by the newspaper reports he'd read or Diamond's own hypnotic suggestions.
If it was a true amnesia, "should he not have inquired of the police why he was in custody and what he had done?" asked Fitts.
"That's not how dissociative states respond to police apprehension," explained Diamond. "From my study of Sirhan's behavior following his being taken to jail, I think it is very characteristic of this type of slow emergence from a state of dissociation, psychosis and partial intoxication, which I think accounts for some of the behavior here."
***
Fitts asked Diamond if the mirrors at the hotel "have significance for you in terms of his going into the dissociative state?"
"Of course they do," said Diamond, as if Fitts had not been listening to a word he'd said. "When Sirhan came back to the hotel and talked to this girl ... he was exhausted, he felt intoxicated, he felt too drunk to drive [and] he wanted the coffee to sober up. He was thinking sexy thoughts of this girl. And in his wanderings in search of more coffee, he came into this little alcove.
"He was the one who mentioned the mirrors under hypnosis and this of course made me . . . immediately recall these hypnotic experiments [at home]." Diamond had no way of knowing for sure if the mirrors at the hotel triggered a dissociated state in Sirhan, but he thought it quite plausible. "I would have no difficulty in triggering off such a state right now with Sirhan in front of everybody," he said. Judge Walker didn't take him up on it.
***
Three and a half days of testimony from Dr. Diamond was closely followed by four days of testimony from Dr. Seymour Pollack. "Pollack did everything to get Sirhan nailed," recalled Kaiser, "and that's the long and the short of it. He pretended to be very sympathetic to Sirhan, but it was an act."
***
On April 8, the defense rested its case after calling twenty-eight witnesses over nineteen days of testimony. Of the thirty-six days of trial testimony, more than half were spent examining Sirhan's mental condition.
Closing arguments began the next day. David Fitts led off for the prosecution; then Russell Parsons made a short but impassioned plea for the defense:
"I would like your verdict to spell, in every hamlet, on every desert in the Arab republic and in Europe, that a man can get justice in America. And justice is not the death penalty or life imprisonment in this case because that isn't warranted for this poor, sick wretch who did not know what he did."
Sirhan sat smiling through Parson's emotional forty-five-minute speech, by one account "savoring the emotional high-points like a disinterested observer at a speech contest." Emile Zola Berman then reprised the deep psychological "traumata" suffered by Sirhan since his arrival in Pasadena.
***
It was then left to Grant Cooper to make a final stand for Sirhan's life.
"We are not here to free a guilty man," he began. "We tell you, as we always have, that he is guilty of having killed Robert Kennedy. Under the facts of this case, Mr. Sirhan deserves to spend the rest of his life in the penitentiary," he said, immediately contradicting Parsons.
"I wouldn't want Sirhan Sirhan turned loose on society, as he is dangerous. There are two sides to Sirhan Sirhan, as has been pointed out by the psychiatrists, which I think demonstrates the type of mental illness he has.
"There is a good Sirhan and a bad Sirhan, and the bad Sirhan is a very nasty Sirhan but I have learned to love the good Sirhan."
***
Cooper summarized the choices available to the jury. He defined "murder in the first degree" as "willful, deliberate and premeditated murder with malice aforethought -- the specific intent to kill." Second-degree murder was diminished premeditation or deliberation plus malice aforethought. Without malice aforethought, it was manslaughter.
"As I view the evidence," Cooper said, "it would be illogical to suggest this wasn't a willful, deliberate and premeditated murder. There's no suggestion in this case that it was upon a sudden heat of passion, which reduces it to manslaughter."
So everything rested on diminished capacity -- "the extent and quality of the mature, meaningful reflection .... You must consider what effect, if any, this diminished capacity had on the defendant's ability to form any of the specific mental states that are essential elements of murder: the intent to kill, willful, deliberate and premeditated, and the reflection upon the gravity of the complicated act. If you have a reasonable doubt about this, you cannot find him guilty of murder of the first degree.
"If because of mental illness, intoxication, or any other cause, the defendant is unable to comprehend his duty [to act lawfully], he does not act with malice aforethought" and would be entitled to manslaughter. The psychiatrists, even Dr. Pollack, had testified that Sirhan had diminished capacity, so the psychiatric evidence did indeed point to manslaughter, a view shared by Russell Parsons.
"But we are not going to ask for it," said Cooper, discarding his colleagues. "In my opinion as a lawyer, the verdict should be second degree."
***
Cooper then proceeded to trample roughshod over the other issues in the case in a desperate plea for second-degree murder, throwing out any good work the defense had done:
"For the purpose of this argument, we can admit that he bought the gun with the intention of killing either Senator Kennedy or President Johnson or [UN] Ambassador Goldberg or any one of those people that he mentioned in his notebook. We can admit that he did it because he was angry at this country for ... supplying arms to Israel.
"We can admit that on June 2nd, he went to the Ambassador Hotel, having in mind that he wanted to kill Senator Kennedy ... for the purpose -- as Mr. Fitts said -- of casing the joint.
"We can admit that he made inquiries of the different persons, sometimes on the 2nd and sometimes on the 4th, as to the route that Senator Kennedy would take; where he was going to be; whether there were going to be bodyguards or not -- all of these things go to show premeditation and deliberation. It shows some planning, some thinking.
"But we come back to the law, and whether or not that is mature and meaningful thinking. The issue in this case is diminished capacity with respect to premeditation and deliberation. It isn't what happened at the time of the firing of the shot. The deliberation took place a long time before that. I don't care if he was in a hypnotic state at the time he fired the shot, or whether he was in a trance, as Dr. Diamond said; this is beside the point."
***
He then bizarrely dissociated himself from Dr. Diamond: "Were you to accept the fact that he shot Senator Kennedy in a dissociated state, he would be not guilty by reason of insanity, because he didn't know what he was doing at the time."
Instead, Cooper depicted an increasingly sick Sirhan. "Twelve witnesses would testify to his change of personality after he fell from the horse .... Dr. Pollack said he had been going downhill for more than a couple of years. Pollack told you the thing that distinguished between a psychotic and a person who was ... less mentally ill was the amount of glue that held them together .... Sirhan became unglued when he shot Senator Kennedy. His brakes wouldn't hold."
Cooper was becoming unglued himself as he accepted the discredited testimony of Alvin Clark at face value, although Sirhan denied it. "We know from the notebooks that he was thinking about doing it and he did do it." He told the trash collector, who knew where he lived, "I am going to kill Senator Kennedy." "Was this mature, meaningful thinking?"
"You remember Dr. Pollack told you that Sirhan told him he believed he had the right, the duty to kill Senator Kennedy and he didn't feel he should be punished for his act ... if he was going to be punished at all it should be a couple of years. Weigh that. Is that mature thinking? Is that meaningful thinking?" How about the rants in Sirhan's notebook? "Why in God's name did Sirhan deny these writings?" Perhaps it was amnesia, but Cooper stressed that Sirhan didn't try to hide anything.
While Cooper couldn't prove that Sirhan was drunk, and Sirhan couldn't remember how many drinks he'd had, "under hypnosis he did say he had four drinks." Cooper couldn't explain Sirhan's behavior in custody, but "he didn't say I am an Arab and I wanted the world to know. He wouldn't even tell them he was an Arab."
What about the outbursts in court? When the notebooks were received into evidence, "he pointed his finger at the Judge and told him 'You are not going to send me to the gas chamber and then tell the world you gave me a fair trial. I will plead guilty.' Is that mature thinking?"
***
Cooper stressed the transparency of the defense effort: "We permitted the prosecution's psychiatrists not only to examine Sirhan but also to place him under hypnosis and ask him anything he wanted .... Dr. Pollack told you it wasn't heard of, never had it happened before .... Could anybody be more open, more aboveboard than that?"
Cooper's argument was long-winded, garbled, rambling, confused, and incomprehensible. He sounded tired, complained of the heat, misquoted prior testimony, and disavowed his colleagues. He tried to sound smooth and urbane to the jury, but he came off as a patronizing fool, merely annoying them. As Kaiser noted, it was not his finest hour.
***
Cooper finished by distilling the majority of the psychiatric testimony, which he said would "reduce" Sirhan's penalty "to manslaughter." He wrote the names of the seven doctors who agreed Sirhan was paranoid-schizophrenic on the board in the courtroom -- Diamond, Richardson, Marcus, Schorr, Seward, De Vos, and Crane.
Cooper asked the jury not to be swayed by the fact that the victim was Robert Kennedy. "Suppose the deceased in this case had been a fellow by the name of John Smith or Jose Gonzales ... and suppose you had the same kind of testimony by the Court-appointed psychiatrists, do you think you would hesitate two minutes in returning a verdict of second degree murder as a result of diminished capacity? You wouldn't hesitate one minute."
Cooper reminded the jury that even if they rejected the idea that Sirhan was in a trance and cited the notebooks as premeditation, they would still have to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether Sirhan's plans were mature and meaningful.
"I am not suggesting Sirhan Sirhan should be given a medal for what he has done ... but I feel that the evidence and the law justifies ... a verdict of guilty of murder of the second degree, and it would certainly take care of the situation."
The Herald Examiner summed up Cooper's argument as "Sirhan was a killer, but a killer who doesn't think straight."
***
In his closing argument for the prosecution, Buck Compton called the case "highly overcomplicated" by psychiatric testimony. Cooper had conceded malice and premeditation, so Compton asserted that it all came down to the quality of the premeditation.
"Did Robert F. Kennedy," he asked, "breathe his last breath on the dirty floor of the Ambassador Hotel because he favored U.S. support for the state of Israel or because he somehow became a substitute father image in some Oedipus complex in Sirhan's mind?"
Compton said the psychiatric testimony was so confusing, "as I stand here, I can't answer the question as to what Sirhan's real motive was."
"If you believe Dr. Diamond with his mirror act, and believe Sirhan was in some kind of trance, so completely out of it that he didn't know if he was on foot or on horseback, it would be inhumane to punish him for any crime. How can you take a poor guy who doesn't know anything about what he's doing and say, 'You're guilty'? It can't be done. So if you believe those so-called experts, you have to turn him loose. But if you don't buy it, there's nothing left but a plain old cold-blooded, first-degree murder."
Compton's diatribe on psychiatry was plainly ignorant, skating over the facts to score cheap points. Referring to Sirhan seeing Kennedy's face in the mirror, he said "I got a picture of Munir standing there trying to get into the bathroom for hours on end while Sirhan was there practicing his mirror act." [In fact, Sirhan practiced in his room.]
Compton later said the whole reason for the psychiatric discipline "is to find something wrong with somebody and what better way to foist their theories on the whole world than in the case of People vs. Sirhan Sirhan."
***
He dismissed the "intoxication gimmick" used by the defense, and asked the jury to look at the facts. "This guy went out to the Ambassador on the night of June 4. He parked his car three blocks away ... he stuck a gun in his belt and he goes into the Ambassador and he gets into the kitchen area, which is unusual for [a] guest at the Ambassador .... Then he asks people if Kennedy is coming this way, and Kennedy does come that way.
"He pulls a gun out of his belt and goes up and at point-blank range puts a bullet right through his head ... [says] 'Kennedy, you S.O.B' ... then he says 'I can explain, I did it for my country.' Then he refuses to identify himself to the police. He is alert and oriented, no odor of alcohol and he refuses, when questioned, to discuss his conduct."
''Anybody, using good common sense and ordinary reason, would conclude from this that the man premeditated the murder." Compton saw the world in black and white -- good guys and bad guys -- with no room for psychiatry or excuses in the courtroom.
At three p.m. on April 14, the trial ended and the case was sent to the jury for deliberation. The options were manslaughter, carrying a penalty of one to fifteen years; second-degree murder (five years to life); or first-degree murder (life in prison or death in the gas chamber).
The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for sixteen hours and forty-four minutes. McCowan had been telling everyone that they'd come back with second-degree, and during the second full day of deliberation, the jury requested clarification of the instructions for second-degree murder.
As he awaited the verdict, Russell Parsons told the press that Sirhan expected to be traded by the government for concessions in the Middle East if convicted, and that Ambassador Nakhleh had discussed the matter with King Hussein of Jordan at the UN.
***
At 10:47 a.m. on April 17, the jury returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree against Sirhan. They also found him guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon with intent to commit murder on the five other counts in the indictment.
At 11:04 a.m. on April 23, a separate penalty trial was concluded when the jury returned the death sentence. Sirhan calmly chewed gum as the verdict was read to him. Kaiser looked on as "Parsons shook his head in disgust, and McCowan put his face in his hands. Sirhan shrugged at his brother Adel, swept the jury with a contemptuous look, threw back his shoulders, and swaggered into the holding tank."
"It's all right," he said, comforting Cooper, Parsons, and McCowan. "Even Jesus Christ couldn't have saved me."
Cooper pledged to take the case to the Supreme Court and cried out to newsmen, "Do any of you think this will act as a deterrent to the kind of crazy mind that assassinates public figures? Assassination has happened before. It will happen again ... but only from those who have warped and diseased minds. I had hoped this circle of violence would end here. It hasn't."
***
Two of the jurors had argued for second-degree murder and life, but the jury finally found unanimity. They considered Sirhan mentally ill but to an insufficient degree for second-degree murder. Juror George Stitzel thought Sirhan deserved death as a "cold-blooded murderer." He said the jury felt Sirhan lied about not remembering the shooting or writing in the notebooks.
***
The verdict came as no surprise to Kaiser. "I think the defense of diminished capacity was over the heads of the jury. They spent far too much time trying to prove it, and the proofs for it were in conflict and so the jury got very confused and they kind of threw up their hands.
"They knew that Sirhan did it. Cooper, in fact, admitted it to the jury and Sirhan on the stand admitted it in a way. He said 'I don't remember doing it but if you say I did it, I guess I did it.' And so the jury went simple.
"You know, juries in America are usually twelve ordinary dummies. Anybody that's got a college degree or a graduate degree is automatically excluded ... because they would be considered prejudiced, but this jury needed some people with graduate degrees to understand this defense, it was too complicated.
"So Sirhan was given the death sentence and it was only later when California changed its death penalty law that Sirhan's death penalty was commuted to life."
"I was upset," recalled Mike McCowan. "I feel he did have diminished capacity but ... it was a long shot that we would be able to keep him from getting the death penalty and you maybe feel that you didn't do your job ... but later on, I said, 'Well, I worked for nothing and I did the best I could do and I can't change the world but I think he got a good defense."
***
On May 5, Kaiser visited Sirhan in his cell. He gave his defense team pretty good marks for their performance but thought the prosecutors were "crooked." Sirhan still couldn't understand the shooting. To satisfy himself with Kennedy, "all I would have needed to do was just to give him a good punch in the nose at that Ambassador. It was a symbolic way of defeating him. It would have been enough for me -- had I been conscious and awake at the time I saw him."
He thought there might be something to Diamond's theories. He compared himself to the ancient sect of the hashshashin, "where the assassin was drugged -- dulled, mentally -- at the time that he commits the crime .... I wasn't under the influence of marijuana, hashish or heroin or whatever. Just a few mirrors and a couple of shots of Tom Collins was enough to put me in that same mental state as the ancient assassins were."
He couldn't understand why anyone in their right mind would kill somebody. "Where's the satisfaction?" Kaiser said, suggesting that the way he shot Kennedy was less cowardly than the snipers who shot Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
"There you go!" said Sirhan. "At least, Kennedy saw me. I think. I don't know ... you see, this is what I don't understand. How did the man himself feel, you know, when he saw me pulling the trigger? I can't imagine that." Kaiser reminded Sirhan that coroner Noguchi said the first shot came from behind the right ear, so Kennedy couldn't have seen him.
"I don't know about that," said Sirhan. "I must have faced him. How the hell else would I see him from profile? Uh, uh, I don't know if I could see him or distinguish him."
***
On May 21, Cooper's motion for a new trial, based on thirteen alleged court errors, was denied, and a letter from Senator Edward Kennedy to DA Evelle Younger was read into the record: "My brother was a man of love and sentiment and compassion. He would not have wanted his death to be a cause for the taking of another life. You may recall his pleas when he learned of the death of Martin Luther King: 'What we need in the United States is not division ... hatred ... violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion towards one another.'"
But the judge had his mind made up, and Sirhan was formally sentenced to death and remanded to San Quentin, where he would await the apple-green gas chamber. Sirhan listened, with hands on hips, then turned and smiled at McCowan.
"Well, now the real battle begins."
***
A new defense team with a background in Palestinian affairs was already in place for Sirhan's appeal -- Lebanese Americans George Shibley and Abdeen Jabara would be joined by Luke McKissack, a Hollywood attorney for the Black Panthers. McCowan had worked with McKissack before and stayed on to help with the appeal. The new team was formally announced on July 2, and it would be years before all legal avenues were exhausted.
***
The day after confirmation of his death sentence, Sirhan was interviewed by Jack Perkins of NBC on the eve of his move to San Quentin. Sirhan walked into a large room in Los Angeles County Jail, past McCowan, Parsons, and Cooper, and took a seat opposite Perkins under the television lights.
''I'm so nervous!" he kept telling Perkins as Cooper looked on, rather disconcertingly, like a proud father. NBC paid a reported $11,500 to the defense fund for the interview, and the eighteen-minute cut subsequently broadcast on June 3, 1969, is a fascinating distillation of the mysteries and conundrums of the trial. Perkins led Sirhan through the case and often seemed slightly bewildered by his responses.
Early on, he asked Sirhan what he thought about Senator Kennedy.
"I thought that he was the prince, sir. I thought he was the heir apparent to President Kennedy and I wished the hell that he could have made it."
"You admired him?"
"I loved him, sir.... He was the hope of all the poor people of this country, sir. And I'm with the poor people -- the minorities."
"You consider yourself a poor person."
"Yes, sir, I do .... I'm not rich." He broke into a wide, ironic smile. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be here, sir, on this program."
***
Sirhan spoke of his disillusionment, while unemployed, in the aftermath of the Israeli victory the year before: "I sincerely tried to find a job, sir. After I was dismissed from school and after this Arab-Israeli War ... I had no identity, no hope, no goal, nothing to strive for and I simply just gave up. There was no more American Dream for me."
"Well, why not?"
"Because I was a foreigner in this country, sir. An alien. A stranger. A refugee." He spat out the phrases with an anguished look on his face. "I wasn't an American. I was an Arab, sir. And that's my greatest setback I've got in this country, especially after the Arab-Israeli War. Because everybody in America loved a winner! And the Israelis won, sir, but I was a loser and I did not like it one bit."
***
Perkins moved on to late May, when Sirhan had first heard the reports of Kennedy's promise to send jet bombers to Israel. Sirhan became "terribly mad" -- "every time I heard the reports ... he would seem like a villain to me. Like a man who wants to kill. Like a man who wants to throw those bombs on the people and destroy ... all of a sudden, he wants to send the very same things that we're going to withdraw from Vietnam to Israel. It seemed paradoxical to me, sir. I couldn't believe it."
"You said in court that at the time you heard that ... you got so mad, I believe your words were, 'I could have blasted him right then.'''
"I could have .... I was that terribly mad, sir. I could have done anything right then and I wouldn't have known what I'd done, sir."
***
"All right, Sirhan, now on the night of the assassination, you said you went to the Ambassador Hotel, had a few drinks and then you said you were too drunk to drive home, didn't you?"
"Yes, sir. I did."
''And what happened?"
"I started searching for coffee. That was all that I wanted to do. And I found some."
"Out in the kitchen area?"
"But where, I don't remember, sir. I don't remember where I saw it but I remember getting the cup. It was a shining ... urn. And there was a girl there."
"She was a pretty girl?"
"I thought she was."
"Did you think you might try to pick her up?"
"Why not?"
"Did you know Senator Kennedy was in that hotel that night at that time?"
"Sir, I did not know that." For a moment, Sirhan seemed unsure of himself. Perkins didn't catch it and moved on.
"After you poured coffee for the girl, then what happened?"
"Then, I don't remember much what happened after that."
"You don't remember much? Do you remember anything that happened after that?"
"Other than the choking and the commotion, I don't remember that."
"The last thing you have distinct recollection of, you say, is pouring coffee for a girl in the hotel.... You remember nothing in between?"
"If I do, sir, I don't know it. ... It's totally out of my mind, so obviously I don't remember it."
Perkins turned to the May 18 reference in Sirhan's notebook.
"You were planning to kill Senator Kennedy."
"Only in my mind, sir."
"Well, that's the only place you can plan it."
"Not to do it physically -- I never thought of doing it .... I don't have the guts to do anything like that."
Sirhan didn't remember writing in the notebook.
"I know, sir, that they are my writings. It's my handwriting; they are my ... thoughts. But I don't remember them, sir."
"Well, did you only write them when you were in great fits of anger?"
"I must have been, sir. I must have been. They are the writings of a maniac, sir."
"They're the writings of Sirhan Sirhan."
"Yes, sir, but ... they're not the writings of me now, sir."
"Well, if you were writing in your notebook now, what would you write about Robert F. Kennedy?"
There's a long pause.
"To me, sir, he is still alive."
Perkins looked dumbfounded. "How?"
"To me, my whole life stopped on June fifth .... Reality to me stopped right then, I guess .... All the time over the past year, from June fifth of sixty-eight on, is unreal to me, sir. I still don't believe what has happened .... I have no realization still that I have killed him, that he's in the grave and all that."
***
"Do you wish he were alive again?"
"Very much so, sir. Every morning when I get up, sir, I say 'I wish that son of a gun were alive, I wouldn't have to be here now.'''
"Oh! Well, that's why you wish he were alive? You wish he were alive, so that you wouldn't be in jail."
"No, I wish he were alive, sir, just ... to be president."
***
Perkins asked Sirhan about the derivation of the word "assassin."
"It comes from the Arabic, doesn't it?"
"Yes, sir. Hashashin, I think. Which means drug takers -- consumers of drugs."
"Because originally, this was a sect that took drugs to commit political murders."
"Yes, sir. Sort of to dull the senses of the killer .... Because I don't think a person, sir, in his right mind would have the ... guts to do what I did."
"You have heard the psychiatrists ... say you are a mentally ill man -- emotionally disturbed. Do you believe that?
"Emotionally disturbed, yes," says Sirhan.
''Are you mentally ill?"
"I'm not mentally ill, sir, but I'm not perfect either."
***
"Arab people, in many Arab countries, seem to consider you something of a hero," suggested Perkins.
Sirhan looked down, embarrassed. "Yes, sir."
"A martyr. They look up to you, it seems."
"I don't feel it, sir. I don't feel myself as a hero. I said that before. Although I think that the world, sir, should know ... that twenty years of suffering, depravation, of injustice for the Palestinian Arab people, sir, is enough."
"Do you think your case has brought this to their attention?"
"I think whatever little attention it has brought, sir, is worth it. My life and ... regrettably, Mr. Kennedy's."
***
"How is your family taking this, Sirhan?"
"Well, it was hard, sir.... I think that they're more sorry for President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, than they are for me, to tell you the truth .... I'm the only one that is responsible for what happened to Robert Kennedy, not my family. And ... I beg society out there not to deprive them of their livelihood as they have been deprived for the past year. Just because they are my family."
"Sirhan, this is a question I think the doctors asked you several times. And I'll ask you now, just to see what your response is. If you had three wishes now, what would they be?"
Sirhan winced.
"The first wish, sir ... I wish that Senator Kennedy were still alive.... I've wished that every day that I've been here. Second one ... "
Tears came to Sirhan's eyes and he started to cover his face with his palm. There was a nineteen-second pause as he struggled to compose himself.
"That there should be peace in the Middle East. That's all."
Sirhan covered his face with his hand, overcome with emotion. That night, he was moved to death row in San Quentin.