So the defense emphasized the psychological side of things, exploring Sirhan’s mental and emotional state, leading up to and including the killing. As far as actual evidence was concerned, Cooper had a very poor grasp of it.
I was told to gather all the background material on Sirhan I could to establish the defendant’s mental state for the psychiatrists and psychologists working the case. I wound up interviewing Sirhan almost every day for six months before, during and after the trial... far more often than any of the attorneys did.
Like any good interviewer, I kept things open and friendly, and after a while Sirhan loosened up. I heard it all — his life story, all his aspirations, his dreams, his high hopes, his dashed hopes.
He’s no idiot. Quite intelligent, really. Well-read, books all over his little cell. If I used a big word on Monday, on Tuesday he’d use it back to me, correctly. Our conversations went all sorts of places, religion, philosophy, politics... but he never veered from his story that he did not remember killing Robert Kennedy. He didn’t deny it — he even said, ‘I must have done it!’ But he didn’t remember a damn thing.
Hell no, I don’t think he did it alone! He was such an unlikely assassin... kind of a chickenshit, really. Like when he worked as a grocery boy in Pasadena and got pissed off at the owner, and claimed he called the guy a goddamn son of a bitch. ‘You said this to his face?’ I asked him. Sirhan said, ‘No, I said it under my breath, so he wouldn’t hear me.’ What the hell kind of macho assassin is that?
When I would get into the idea of possible involvement of others in the assassination, he would get evasive. I think he was lying about that. But I don’t think he was lying about not remembering the shooting itself.
Even Dr. Diamond couldn’t break through that. Who? Dr. Bernard Diamond — the shrink the defense team brought in to ascertain Sirhan’s mental state... to try to learn what happened through hypnosis. Diamond almost immediately found out Sirhan was an incredibly easy subject. Went under so fast, so deep, that keeping him conscious enough to answer questions could be tricky.
You’re right, Nate — achieving that kind of rapid hypnotic state does generally indicate prior hypnosis. But as far as Diamond was concerned, he seemed to be more interested in implanting ‘memories’ than recovering them.
After countless sessions, Diamond came to what I consider to be an unlikely conclusion — that Sirhan programmed himself to kill Robert Kennedy. Diamond based this in part on Sirhan having fallen off a horse back in ’67. No serious injuries but occasional blurred vision and some chronic pain... and the loss of a lifelong dream to become a jockey.
The fall seemed to engender changes in behavior — the talkative, polite Sirhan turned withdrawn and irritable. During this period, Sirhan saw numerous doctors, without relief. He also became interested in self-hypnosis and mysticism. He joined the Rosicrucians, an organization that is itself fascinated by the occult and mysticism. There’s a three-month gap leading up to March ’68, by the way, where Sirhan just drops out of sight.
I believe Sirhan really doesn’t remember shooting Robert Kennedy, that he probably killed Kennedy in a trance and was programmed to forget that he’d done it, and also programmed to forget the names and identities of others who might have helped him do it.
During the trial, I wanted Grant Cooper to at least expose the jury to this possibility, and share various clues that Sirhan was, in fact, not himself that night, that he might have been acting under other influences, possibly programmed under hypnosis. We had tape-recorded all of Sirhan’s hypnotic sessions, so those could have been played for the jury, who could make up their own minds.
But Cooper said, ‘They’re never going to believe that! Anyway, I’d be a laughingstock. Drop it.’ That was a huge disappointment to me during the trial. Even Dr. Diamond backed off from that theory, that Sirhan was a ‘Manchurian Candidate.’ I’m not sure why — I think because he didn’t want to look silly.
“Instead,” Kiser said, “Dr. Diamond fell in with the other defense psychologists in saying Sirhan was a paranoid schizophrenic. But Cooper’s whole approach, of pleading diminished capacity, sailed over the jury’s heads.”
I’d been leaned back in my desk chair, taking all this in. Kiser seemed to be finished, so I asked, “What are you after from me, Ron?”
He bounced a fist off my desk — not enough to make anything jump, but making his point. “Keep digging. Keep looking. The whole idea of a conspiracy was ignored in that trial. Actively kept out by the defense! In the meantime, I’ll get to work on my book, my insider’s look at the case and how it played out in court, and my own investigation, as far as it got. So. What do you say?”
“I say make the check out to the A-1.”
“Good. Good. Where will you start?”
“By asking if you can get me in to talk to Sirhan Sirhan.”
“I can try.”
“Try hard. In the meantime, I’ll look into that ‘Manchurian Candidate’ angle you mentioned.”
The morning fog had long since burned off and the sky over the beach in Malibu was a perfect, nearly cloudless light blue over a gray-blue ocean so calm it seemed to shimmer more than roll, the surf brushing in against the sand in a foamy teasing tickle. It was in the low sixties and my suitcoat was unbuttoned and I’d left my shoes and socks in the Jag. The geometric modern house nearby might have been a set left over from a science-fiction movie. This was a perfect day in a part of the world where perfect days were one thing that didn’t require special effects. Who wouldn’t be happy here?
“When Bobby Kennedy was killed,” the tall, movie-star-handsome film director said, “the lights in a part of me went out, too.”
John Frankenheimer might have still been standing here where I’d left him almost a year ago, only now the loose shirt and chinos were pastel, not earth tones. His left hand was in a pocket and his right hand held a shot glass with an inch or so of golden brown liquid in it. You didn’t have to be a detective to figure out that was Scotch.
“With Bob,” he went on, “I felt I was part of something. That I could change the world. He made an idealist out of me. Then suddenly he was gone and nothing mattered.”
He was just a little drunk.
“We’re thinking of moving to France,” he said. “Evans and I have always loved Paris.”
He was referring to his actress wife, the redundantly named beauty Evans Evans, that gorgeous brunette who would have made any husband’s life tolerable anywhere. Wichita, Kansas, for example, where he’d told me they’d be heading next week, to start production on his new film — The Gypsy Moths.
“I’m looking into the possibility,” I said, “that Sirhan Sirhan was Laurence Harvey.”
In The Manchurian Candidate, Harvey had portrayed a brainwashed innocent programmed through hypnotism by Communists to assassinate a presidential candidate.
Frankenheimer gave me a sharp look that had a smile in it for just a moment. “George always said our movie was possible. I’m not saying he was wrong.”
George Axelrod, the screenwriter of The Manchurian Candidate.
The director shrugged in elaborate cynicism. “But suppose that is what happened to Bob? Who’s going to do something about it? Nixon?”
“Maybe I’ll do something about it.”