LIsa Pease - A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL

To
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
and
Munir Sirhan

who have courageously sought the truth
about what happened to their loved ones
on June 5, 1968

2018 LISA PEASE

A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL

The Real History of the Assassination of

ROBERT F. KENNEDY

Lisa Pease

I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves.

Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies, but above all, from our own misguided policiesand what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best, hope of man.

There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Kansas State

University, March 18, 1968

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sensible people keep asking if it is really worth the time and effort to dig into the difficult past in this difficult way. Some time ago, near the beginning of this long journey, I tried to explain my own reason for pressing ahead. Assassinations of national figures are not ordinary murders, I wrote. When bullets distort or nullify the national will, democracy itself has been attacked. When a series of such events changes the direction of the nation and occurs under suspicious circumstances, institutions seem compromised or corrupted and democratic process itself undermined. It was Robert Kennedys special gift that he understood the new realities of power in this country and could make people believe that if they roused themselves to the effort they could, as he liked to put it, reclaim America. Perhaps that helps explain why the pain of his loss remains so great after so long a time.

Congressman Allard Lowenstein,

Saturday Review, February 19, 1977

I STOOD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS WHEN I STARTED LOOKING into this case. Former FBI agent Bill Turner and former journalist Jonn Christian first opened my eyes to the numerous discrepancies in the governments case against Sirhan Sirhan. Robert Blair Kaisers book made me curious about Sirhans mental state at the time of the shooting. Dr. Phil Melansons work brought provocative witnesses into view.

I am indebted to the archivists at the California State Archives who put up with my numerous requests and made key records available to me. I am grateful to the news organizations that donated footage of the event to the libraries at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) and UCLA. I watched dozens of hours of video from the event and listened to dozens of hours of taped witness interviews, many of which had never been transcribed, to find some of the new information youll see in these pages.

Im grateful to the folks who maintain the Mary Ferrell Archives, a collection of files from various government agencies relating to our secret history. The FBI, CIA, LAPD and Los Angeles County files there were invaluable, as were the Sirhan trial transcript and related court filings.

Thank you, Los Angeles Public Library. I had only a passing interest in this case, having focused my attention on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But one day, while looking for something else, I stumbled upon a drawer full of reels of microfilm from the Robert Kennedy investigation. The tapes were unlabeled, so I put a reel into the machine at random. I was immediately impressed by the number of reports of suspects beyond Sirhan, including one who had been handcuffed at the scene. I knew these files had only been released four years earlier and suspected there was a wealth of information that had not surfaced in the few books on the case that had been published to date. My suspicion proved to be well founded, as you will see in this book.

Special thanks go to all members of my family as well as the friends and coworkers who urged me to continue even when completion of this journey seemed a distant fantasy.

Munir Sirhan gave me insight into the shoddy way the defense team treated the family of Sirhan Sirhan and has shown a deep passion for justice as well as a broad knowledge of the intricacies of this case. He also gave me three bags of the best lemons I have ever tasted, fresh off his backyard tree.

The most surprising and welcome development of all was being able to discuss the case with Robert Kennedy, Jr. Of all the members of the Kennedy family, Bobby has long been the truest heir to the legacy of his father and his uncle John. Bobby is an attorney, an environmental activist, and the co-founder and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. I was impressed with Bobby before I met him. But I was even more impressed after discussing the case with him and seeing how quickly his mind worked, how easily he grasped concepts that others had shown trouble understanding. In turn, he taught me about some legal aspects of this case, as well as how to make perfect corn on the cob! I will be forever grateful to our mutual friend, author David Talbot, for connecting us.

David also made possible my second meeting with John Meier, whose interesting story about what he learned while working for Howard Hughes greatly informed my work. Or maybe I should thank John, who told David he wouldnt meet with him unless David brought me along. I was devastated to learn that David had suffered a stroke as I was nearing the finish line on this book. I hope by the time you are reading this that he has fully recovered.

Paul Schrade became a treasured ally over the course of our many encounters. Not only did I get to know him through this case, I got to know him from political events all over Los Angeles. Whenever there was a group that needed support, he was there. He is a gem of an activist on all sorts of progressive issues, and his tenacity in calling for reinvestigations of this case has been unparalleled.

Posthumous thanks go to Adel Sirhan, who called me after one of my first articles on the case to find out for himself if I were sincere and honest. He told me I passed his muster, but I never got to meet him in person as he died shortly after.

I learned so much about the ballistic evidence from Lynn Mangan that I must posthumously thank her too. She spent decades examining the evidence in the case, and hosted me at her place in Reno for a few days to explain to me what she had learned. She generously shared not only her research but also her world-class collection of miscellaneous historical artifacts.

Posthumous thanks go to Carl McNabb as well, a former CIA operative who quit the agency in disgust and in later years attempted suicide. We took an instant liking to each other, and he shared some information with me he had not shared with others. He was a sensitive and charming man whose genuine concern for the world touched me. In Bill Turners and Jonn Christians book, he appears under the name Jim Rose.

Posthumous thanks are also due Gordon Novel, another CIA operative who led quite a darker life than Carl. Almost in spite of himself, he provided me some valuable information about this case and others, along with some terrifically entertaining lies. He was the most colorful speaker I have ever encountered, with a vocabulary more befitting a Damon Runyan novel than an assassination investigation.

Thanks to Cyril Wecht and his son Ben for providing me the opportunity on several occasions to share my knowledge with others at conferences sponsored by the Wecht Institute at Duquesne University. Thanks to Jim Lesar and all the people at the Assassination Archives Research Center who have hosted me at conferences in Bethesda, Maryland, as well (and who posted my testimony to a United Nations inquiry regarding the 1961 death of U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjld). Posthumous thanks to John Judge, who gave me my start as a speaker at Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) conferences in Dallas and Washington, D.C. Im grateful to have met and learned much about the research process from incredible historians at these conferences, including Bill Turner, John Newman, Gary Aguilar, Bill Davy, Jim Douglass and others. I met the maker of the documentary