Still Searching for Bobby

Sidewalks with Tom Deignan

Still Searching for Bobby

June 6, 2008

Sidewalks by Tom Deignan

IRISH-born documentary film maker Shane O’Sullivan will be in New York City this week to discuss what he believes to be the hidden conspiracy behind the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. This is just one of many events marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of RFK in California.

On the nostalgic side of things, a new book of photos entitled R.F.K.: A Photographer’s Journal will be released. The photos were taken by famed lensman Harry Benson, and include “fabulous pictures of Robert Kennedy romping with his children,” as the gossip columnist Liz Smith recently put it in a breathless item.

Another soon-to-be released book is A Time it Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties, by Bill Eppridge, with an introduction by Irish American journalist Pete Hamill, who was there, the evening of June 5, when Kennedy was shot.

Prior to the assassination, everyone was thinking about whether or not Kennedy was going to win the California Democratic primary. Hamill recalls catching a glimpse of the pensive, anxious RFK that night.

“There, Kennedy sat in shirtsleeves, the cuffs turned up, his tie loose, grinning with a kind of dark Irish fatalism in his eyes,” writes Hamill.

Hamill recalls that, after meeting RFK for the first time at an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day in 1968, a friendship developed.

“Every month or so, I would speak to Kennedy on the telephone, or visit him in his apartment near the United Nations. We talked about the world and human folly and almost everything else, except Jack. Bob had that Irish gift for making laughter out of a dreadful world,” says Hamill.

When the likes of Hamill, Smith and conspiracy theorists converge on a single subject, 40 years after that subject died, you know something serious is going on in the culture.

Kennedy, of course, has also been a hot topic on the Clinton-Obama campaign trail, with the former recently implying that since RFK was assassinated late in the primary game, she should not drop out of the race just yet, because you never know what is going to happen.

For a brief, shining moment 40 years ago, as Hamill reminds us, RFK did seem like the politician so many had been dreaming of. Yet it is worth pointing out that RFK also worked as a staff member for infamous red-hunter Joseph McCarthy, and even considered asking Joe to serve as godfather to his first-born child.

Most serious biographers note that Bobby could be ruthless and manipulative, and preferred hard-headed, unromantic realism to the idealism for which he is so well remembered.

In short, RFK could be a serious SOB.

And yet, America’s lingering fascination with RFK –- just as Senator Edward Kennedy continues his battle with a brain tumor -– reveals, among other things, that we still look at the Irish clan with utter reverence.

But for all of the touching photos of RFK and his kids, and all of the remembrances of the Bobby who brought blacks, Mexicans and poor whites together for a brief moment 40 years ago, perhaps nothing says that we pine for the mythical RFK more than the fact that Shane O’Sullivan is resurrecting the conspiracy theories surrounding Bobby’s murder.

O’Sullivan’s film RFK Must Die will be shows at Manhattan’s Pioneer Theater on East 3rd Street (at Avenue A) this weekend. On Thursday, Friday and Sunday, O’Sullivan will also be on hand to discuss the film, as well as the possibility that RFK’s jailed killer did not act alone.

“Sirhan Sirhan was convicted as the ‘lone assassin,’ but witnesses placed him several feet in front of Kennedy and for 40 years, Sirhan has never been able to remember the shooting,” the film’s promotional material reads.

“Extra bullet holes in the pantry suggested a second gunman was involved. A girl in a polka-dot dress seen with Sirhan in the pantry later fled the scene, exclaiming, ‘We shot him! We shot Kennedy!’”

Such conspiracy theories flourish mainly because many people don’t want to believe a beloved figure could be wiped away by a mere lone nut.

Yet had he actually become president, there’s no way RFK would be remembered quite so fondly. He would have had to make hard choices about Vietnam and civil rights and the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, the course of American history would undoubtedly be different, most likely for the better. That, more than any conspiracy theory, seems to be as high a compliment as you could pay a public figure.

(Contact Tom at tomdeignan@verizon.net)

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