Assassin Nation

This is one of those cases where the real world sounds like something from one of my books:

A lawyer for Sirhan Sirhan, the confessed assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, plans to present new evidence at a parole board hearing suggesting that he did not act alone, was potentially brain washed and cannot remember anything about the 43-year-old shooting.

"There is no question he was hypno-programmed," lawyer William F. Pepper told ABCNews.com. "He was set up. He was used. He was manipulated."

This caught my attention because RFK actually figures into my next book, THE PRESIDENT'S VAMPIRE, and so does Sirhan. Conspiracy theorists have been making this claim for years — check out this passage from The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, written by my friends John Whalen and Jonathan Vankin:

Sirhan himself was the strangest element of a strange case. Not that the lad himself was terribly odd. But his memory blackouts; his "automatic writing" including the repeated scrawl, "RFK must die!" scribbled randomly in notebooks that the LAPD for some reason saw fit to label "diaries"; the analysis of a former army intelligence officer who gave Sirhan a Psychological Stress Evaluation; and the testimony of a witness in a later civil trial who quoted acquaintances of Sirhan's as describing him "in a trance" – they all add up to one bizare but unavoidable conclusion: when he shot Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan was hypnotized.

You can also see what Sirhan was writing in his journal before the assassination. He mentions the Illuminati, black magic, and writes "God help me."

This particular conspiracy theory has tendrils that extend from RFK to JFK to MLK, to the Son of Sam and Charles Manson and the CIA, and even to Jared Lee Loughner's recent murder spree in Tucson. But this is the first time I've heard Sirhan's lawyer actually make the argument that he was brainwashed.

 

There is a powerful inclination to explain the world through dark plots and patterns. From Oliver Stone's JFK to Glenn Beck's chalk-dusted connections to the die-hard Obama birthers and 9/11 Truthers, this kind of paranoia has always had a place in American politics. But now it's become a part of the mainstream national discourse. I doubt the parole board is going to buy Sirhan's argument. But it will be interesting to see how many other people do.