A Shocking Fact about Bobby Kennedy's Assassination You Probably Don't Know

"...I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy,” medical examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi bluntly stated in his 1983 memoir Coroner.

Recently I was drinking bourbon with a close friend who conceded he now harbored suspicions about the JFK assassination, stating he believes Lee Harvey Oswald was merely a patsy.

We discussed some of the stranger parts of the case: the failures of the Warren Commission, Harry Truman’s salvo against the CIA following the assassination, and the fact that other world leaders seem to have suspicions that there was more foul play at work than the commission wanted Americans to believe.

Then the conversation briefly pivoted to Bobby Kennedy’s assassination.

“That seems more like a freak thing to me. A lone nut,” he said. “Sirhan Sirhan obviously killed him.”

I nodded and sipped my bourbon. I knew some things about the JFK assassination and was learning more, but I knew little about RFK’s assassination beyond the basic details—he was shot at a Los Angeles hotel while campaigning for president in 1968.

I’ve learned a few more things since that bourbon-fueled discussion, and some of the details surrounding RFK’s assassination seem worth sharing.

Some of the details are merely circumstantial, like Jackie Kennedy telling Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the young Harvard historian who served in the JFK administration, that she had grave concerns about Bobby running for president.

“Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” Jackie told Schlesinger at a cocktail party. “The same thing that happened to Jack.”

Then there is the fact that Bobby made it clear to members of his inner circle that he was running for president to lay bare what he believed was a conspiracy surrounding his brother’s killing.

Then there’s the fact that people such as LBJ and CIA headquarters chief Bill Harvey hated RFK with a palpable intensity.

Interesting details, to be sure. But as I said, merely circumstantial.

The real shocker for me was the official view that a second gunman was present at the RFK assassination at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.

‘I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy’

Unlike JFK’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s shooting death has not been analyzed under a microscope by the American public.

Nevertheless, I was stunned to learn that I had no idea that official reports suggested the likelihood of a second gunman. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the former Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner for the County of Los Angeles, alluded to the likelihood of a second gunman in his official autopsy.

“Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy,” Noguchi bluntly stated in his 1983 memoir Coroner.

I had no idea such a scenario—a second gunman—was considered a credible idea, let alone a likely one until I read David Talbot’s history The Devil’s Chessboard. In the book, Talbot explains the reasoning for the hypothesis.

“…numerous eyewitnesses—including one of them men who subdued Sirhan—insisted that the alleged assassin could not have fired the shot that killed Kennedy,” Talbot writes. “Sirhan was several feet in front of Kennedy when he began firing with his revolver. But the fatal shot—which struck RFK at point-blank range behind the right ear, penetrating his brain—was fired from behind.”