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.
