The Good Father by Noah Hawley Read Free Book Online

attended John Muir High School and Pasadena City College. For a short time he had worked at a racetrack in Santa Anita and at a local Pasadena health-food store.
    After he was identified, police went to his residence, where they found a detailed notebook containing incriminating statements. In a journal entry dated May 18, 1968, Sirhan wrote:
My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more and more of an unshakable obsession … R.F.K. must die … R.F.K. must be killed … Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68.
    Having been raised with a hatred of Israel, his beliefs about the Jews had become increasingly paranoid in the months leading up to the assassination. “The Jews are behind the scenes wherever you go,” he said. He confessed that he was not “psychotic … except when it comes to the Jews.”
    Sirhan’s father was a domineering man who had been physically abusive. In 1957, a year after he brought his family to America, he abandoned them and went back to Jordan. Sirhan was thirteen. He never saw his father again.
    After the assassination, friends said that Sirhan Sirhan had often expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and his “solution” to the Jewish problem.
    Ten years after his father left, on June 5, 1967, Israel and Egypt went to war. Jordan, which had signed a mutual defense treaty with Egypt, attacked Israel from the east. Six days later Israel had gained control of the Sinai peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golan Heights. Egypt and Jordan had lost a war they had no right losing.
    That fall Sirhan, unemployed, spent most of his time at the Pasadena public library reading extensively about the Six-Day War. He read the B’nai B’rith Messenger so he could keep track of what he called “Zionist intentions.” His anger was like an animal he raised in his bedroom, feeding it, nurturing it, helping it grow.
    On May 26, 1968, Robert Kennedy made a speech at a Jewish templein Portland, Oregon, supporting the sale of advanced fighter planes to Israel. One week later, on June 4, 1968, Sirhan saw an advertisement announcing a march down Wilshire Boulevard to commemorate the first anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. It was a “big sign, for some kind of fund, or something … a fire started burning in me … I thought the Zionists or Jews or whoever it was were trying to rub it in that they had beat hell out of the Arabs.”
    At his trial Sirhan said “that brought me back to the six days in June of the previous year … I was completely pissed off at American justice at the time … I had the same emotionalism, the same feelings, the fire started burning inside me … at seeing how these Zionists, these Jews, these Israelis … were trying to rub in the fact that they had beaten the hell out of the Arabs the year before … when I saw that ad, I was off to go down and see what these sons of bitches were up to.”
    After extensive interviews with Sirhan, psychiatrist Dr. George Y. Abe described his political thoughts as irrational. Sirhan, he said, had “paranoid-inclined ideations, particularly in the political sphere, but there is no evidence of outright delusions or hallucinations.”
    Defense psychiatrists claimed Sirhan suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was in a dissociative state at the time of the assassination. The prosecution argued that Sirhan’s repeated written exclamations that “R.F.K. must die” showed premeditation and planning.
    At trial, Sirhan testified that his feelings toward Robert Kennedy turned to hate when he saw television reports of RFK participating in an Israeli Independence Day celebration. Asked by his lawyer, Grant Cooper, if anyone had put it in his mind that Robert Kennedy was a “bad person,” Sirhan said, “No, no, this is all mine … I couldn’t believe it. I would rather die … rather than live with it … I have the shock of it … the humility and all this talk about the Jews