The Good Father by Noah Hawley Read Free Book Online Page A

being victorious …”
    In April 1968, two months before the assassination, Sirhan spoke of his hatred for RFK to an African American garbage worker he’d befriended. Alvin Clark testified under oath at the trial about Sirhan’s desire to shoot Kennedy.
    According to Clark, Sirhan said he’d heard a radio broadcast in which “the announcer said Robert Kennedy was at some Jewish Club or Zionist Club in Beverly Hills.” Kennedy had said, “We are committed to Israel’s survival. We are committed to defying any attempt to destroy Israel,whatever the source. And we cannot and must not let that commitment waver.” Sirhan left the room putting his hands on his ears and almost weeping.
    According to one of his lawyers, after the broadcast Sirhan “was disturbed that both his mother and his brothers did not see Senator Kennedy as the same destructive and malevolent and dangerous person as Sirhan perceived him to be; and I gather that he and his family … had some arguments about this.”
    On June 5, 1968, exactly one year after the Six-Year War broke out, Sirhan Sirhan went to the Ambassador Hotel. He waited in the kitchen for Kennedy’s speech to end. And then, as Kennedy made his way through the pantry, Sirhan took an Iver Johnson eight-shot .22-caliber pistol out of his pocket, stepped in front of him, and fired.
    These are the facts. And yet if Sirhan Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy, how did he shoot him three times in the back?

 
    Murray arrived at ten thirty. I heard him yelling in the hall. After a few minutes the door opened and Moyers escorted him in.
    “Get your coat,” he told me.
    We rode the elevator in silence. When I tried to speak, Murray put his finger to his lips.
    The temperature had dropped a few degrees, enough for me to shiver as I crossed the parking lot to his car.
    “There’s a myth,” said Murray, “that Secret Service agents take a blood oath where they swear to lay down their lives to protect our president. In truth, there’s no such oath.”
    We climbed into his Porsche. I buckled the racing harness.
    “With your car I always feel like I’m climbing into a fighter plane,” I told him.
    He put the car in gear, pulled out of the gate, throwing a middle finger at the guards.
    “Here’s the latest,” he said. “I talked to the Department of Justice. They sent me to Homeland Security. I called Homeland Security and they said, ‘Call the Secret Service,’ so I called a guy I know at the FBI. He says they’re holding Danny at a facility in downtown Los Angeles. He has been treated by a paramedic but has not been to a hospital. As far as my guy knows, the bullet is still in his leg.”
    “He could lose the leg, Murray.”
    “Calm down. Then I called another guy I know at CBS and leaked the story that the Secret Service is denying Danny treatment. They’re going to run it on the eleven o’clock news.”
    Looking down I noticed a red stain on my shirt. Had I cut myself somehow? But then I remembered the pizza, Fran and I hunched over in front of the TV, eating. It felt like two hundred years ago.
    “My buddy also said they have still photographs of Danny pulling the trigger,” said Murray. “No way it wasn’t him. For what it’s worth.”
    I couldn’t believe it. This was a boy who’d cried over the death of a neighbor’s cat. Until I saw the picture myself, I refused to believe he’d been anything more than an innocent bystander.
    “Somebody set him up,” I said.
    Murray raised his eyebrows as if to say, I’m sure you’re right . But I could tell he didn’t believe it.
    As a clinician I asked myself, what did this photograph show? My son with a gun, or my son firing a gun? They were two very different things. He was a boy in a crowd. An assassin fires at the stage. There is a struggle with spectators. My son gets caught in the middle. He ends up with the gun. Is it likely? No. But it is possible, and in my business it is the unlikely that shows itself time