Assassin

Last Friday, a parole board “panel” in California, consisting of two individuals, voted to grant parole to Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the man who shot presidential hopeful Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. Kennedy died the next day. Sirhan has served fifty years of a life sentence with the possibility of parole. He is now seventy-seven years old. This was his sixteenth parole hearing, and it does not ensure his release. The full board must agree to the parole. The recommendation is then passed to the Governor of California who may uphold or reverse it.

For nearly a week, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this news, and I’m having a devil of a time doing it.

I was only fourteen in 1968, but my youth did not shelter me from the shock of this crime. In fact, Kennedy’s assassination altered the course of my life at that time.

My ninth-grade World History teacher, Herbert Jehle, was a good man and a great teacher. While he taught us events that had transpired in the world centuries before, he reminded us daily that we were currently living in a dynamic era of history, which included the Civil Rights Movement, the war in Vietnam (and its subsequent opposition in the U.S.), the women’s rights movement, and a cultural revolution that had some of us petitioning the school administrators to allow girls to wear pants to school.

I had already stepped over the edge of that fateful abyss and become a news junkie while witnessing on television the brutal struggle forward of the Civil Rights Movement, and I was also habituated to reading our daily newspaper. But I’d been reluctant to allow myself interest in politics for one reason: My father loved John F. Kennedy. Are you kidding me? An Irish Catholic veteran becoming President of the United States? My dad’s excitement was palpable—despite the fact that he was in the last months of his life due to a terminal illness. My father died in May of 1963. JFK was assassinated the following November. Watching the teachers at my elementary school in tears, I remember thinking two things: What's the point of becoming President if the opposition simply assassinates you once you get elected? And at least my dad didn’t live to experience the tragedy of his hero being shot down in such a horrific and public way.

Still, Mr. Jehle’s daily updates on the presidential campaign were interesting, and I began to see a glimmer of hope in what I read of Robert Kennedy in the newspaper. He supported the Civil Rights Movement. Not as a campaign promise, but in real, definitive action, and he had when he was U.S. Attorney General in the early 1960’s. I liked him.

And when I say “I liked him,” trust me, this was not a schoolgirl crush. I was well aware that many young women thought he was some sort of heart throb. I didn’t see it. He had that goofy Massachusetts accent, for one thing, and I didn’t find him particularly attractive. But as I learned more about what he stood for—his vision for what America could be if we could sort out the tangle of our war on an Asian shore and the long-armed legacy of Jim Crow—I really, really liked him.

So on that now infamous evening of June 5, 1968, I was glued to the TV set in our living room, watching, waiting, hoping that “Bobby” would win the California primary. And he did. The memory has remained vivid for 53 years. The announcement. Kennedy stepping up to the podium to joke and celebrate with the crowd that was delirious with victory and hope. And his last words before he turned away: “…so it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”

Which is when I reached over and turned off the television. It was late. I had school the next day. My sister and I had horses, and we would get up at 5:00 to feed and care for them before getting ready for school. We woke to a small clock radio alarm set to KRLA, a station based in Pasadena but broadcasting to the greater Los Angeles area.

In the pre-dawn hours the morning Robert Kennedy was shot, I thought I was waking from a nightmare. I’d been in such a deep sleep from staying up the night before, the radio alarm had been playing for some time, but the station wasn’t broadcasting music. The news of Bobby being critically wounded had infiltrated my dreams. When I came fully awake, for a brief second I experienced that universal relief: Oh. It was just a nightmare.

But it wasn’t. It was real.

I spent the day in shock. I have no memory of it. But I woke the following morning to the news that he had died.

It was as if someone had held a match to my youthful idealism and laughed as it burned. My interest in both politics and journalism crumbled into ash and floated away on the wind. It would not be rekindled for many years. I didn’t even really follow Sirhan Sirhan’s trial, but remember being glad that he was given the death penalty. He killed the hopes of so many. He should die for it.

That’s what I thought at age 14. That is not the person I am today.

Which brings me back around to my attempt at processing the potential release of Robert Kennedy’s killer.

Salient facts:

Sirhan has always insisted he ‘does not recall’ the shooting.

No motive for the shooting has ever been established. (Disregard the rumors, perpetrated by the press and the former mayor of Los Angeles, that Sirhan was a militant Palestinian angry over Kennedy’s sympathy toward Israel. This has never been born out.)

The man has been in prison for 50 years. Fifty. years.

This is what I wonder:

Is the purpose of prison to punish? Or rehabilitate? If the former, how do we determine when the punishment has been sufficient? If the latter, is this man—who was 24 at the time of the shooting—such a hardened criminal that it took 50 years to rehabilitate him?

The United States has the largest prison system in the world—and that includes China. Does that mean America has far more criminals than anywhere else in the world? Or is it because we have a lock-him-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality?

To be honest, I don’t know the answers. I’m still trying to process all this, as I said. Maybe all these questions are moot, if the full parole board ultimately denies parole. Maybe we should have been asking them already. I’m hoping my readers will respond with some perspectives of their own. Feel free to comment below.