Ethel Kennedy struck a medical attendant in the face while riding in the ambulance that carried her grievously wounded husband, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, to a Los Angeles hospital emergency room.
The chaotic and heart-wrenching scene is detailed in an FBI report buried among 10,000 pages of previously classified documents related to Kennedy’s assassination that were released Friday under President Trump’s orders.
The newly published pages include FBI interviews with eyewitnesses to the June 5, 1968, shooting and assassin Sirhan Sirhan’s handwritten and rambling notes. Dozens of letters from an anguished public demanded answers and a federal response to assassinations of Kennedy, his brother President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
An FBI interview with an ambulance worker who attended to Kennedy after he was shot described a distraught Ethel Kennedy preventing him from providing medical assistance as the wounded Kennedy struggled to breathe, telling him, “You keep your dirty filthy hands off my husband.”
She then “struck him on the right side of his face, stunning him,” a June 12, 1968, FBI report stated, and tried to get a Kennedy aide to remove the attendant from the ambulance.
The attendant told the FBI that Ethel Kennedy, then pregnant with their 11th child, grabbed his record book and threw it out of the ambulance when he questioned her about the circumstances of her husband’s injury.
Robert F. Kennedy was shot three times as he passed through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.Â
He had just delivered a victory speech after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.
Sirhan, now 81, was convicted of his murder and is serving a life sentence in a California state prison.
The files released Friday include Sirhan’s handwritten notes detailing his obsession with assassinating Kennedy and other government figures. He also advocated for overthrowing then-President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Sirhan, a Jordanian citizen and Palestinian, complained about the government and its spending on the Vietnam War and said the U.S. “should start declining at a faster rate so the real utopia will not be far from being realized.”
Sirhan said his “solution to this type of government” is “to do away with its leaders — and declare anarchy the best form of government — or no government.”
Interviews with family members included in the documents describe Sirhan developing mental health problems after falling off a horse while working at a racetrack years before the assassination.
The files are among the first tranche in what will be a series of records disclosures related to the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, said Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
An additional 50,000 related documents were discovered while officials were scouring FBI and CIA warehouses for records, and those will be released at a later date.
“Nearly 60 years after the tragic assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the American people will, for the first time, have the opportunity to review the federal government’s investigation thanks to the leadership of President Trump,” Ms. Gabbard said in a statement.
Mr. Trump issued an executive order soon after taking office that determined releasing the files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. was “in the public interest.”
While thousands of pages of John F. Kennedy assassination files have been released, the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. files “had not been digitized and sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades,” Ms. Gabbard said.
Letters from the public to the Justice Department and Johnson, included in the declassified documents, describe anger and devastation over Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. His death came exactly two months after King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and five years after his brother’s assassination in Dallas.
“With the leaders who are trying to help this country being shot, there will be no more America,” Gail Perry, of New York City, wrote to Mr. Johnson on June 5, 1968. “What is the world coming to? Criminals are running around the country endangering us. Something has to be done. Mr. Johnson, will you or can you do something?”
Mr. Kennedy’s eldest son, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated publicly he does not believe Sirhan killed his father, but rather a second gunman, Thane Eugene Cesar, fired the fatal shot.
Cesar was employed as an outside contractor providing services as Kennedy’s bodyguard. His FBI interview is included in the newly released files.
Cesar was never regarded as a suspect and passed a polygraph test. He sold his gun months after the assassination. He described to the FBI the crowded scene in the Ambassador hotel kitchen as he shepherded Kennedy through it.
Dozens of people were in the kitchen, among them cooks, waiters, news reporters and others, he said. He told the FBI that Mr. Kennedy pulled loose from his grasp to shake hands with a busboy.
“As Kennedy was shaking hands with the busboy, Cesar looked up and saw a hand sticking out of the crowd between two camera men and the hand was holding a gun,” the FBI described in a report. “Just as Cesar started to move to jump on the gun, he saw the red flash come from the muzzle.”
Cesar said he never saw Sirhan’s face due to the bright camera lights and estimated Kennedy was two feet from the gunman.
In a statement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the release of his father’s assassination investigation files “a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the date on which Robert F. Kennedy was shot.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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