Robert Kennedy Jr. has long maintained that Sirhan Sirhan, who has spent nearly 60 years in prison for killing his father, is innocent of the crime — and that a second gunman was involved in the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy in 1968.
That belief has fueled division between him and the majority of his siblings as well as their mother, Ethel, when she was alive. And it’s sure to heat up again as Sirhan, 81, could be eligible for parole again next year.
“I believe Cesar killed my father,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in a 2021 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed of security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, who died in 2019 and was never charged. “Sirhan,” Kennedy Jr. wrote, “is not my father’s killer.”
It was revealed Wednesday that Kennedy Jr., the current US health and human services secretary, sent a letter to then-US Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012 requesting a new investigation into his father’s death and the two-gunmen theory. The letter to Holder, who served under President Barack Obama, came to light in documents on the assassination declassified by the Trump administration.
