The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity

"Moldea’s book is almost a unique artifact in conspiracy theory because it’s very rare for conspiracy theorists to change their minds and it’s exceedingly rare for a conspiracy theorist to do what Moldea did, which is change his mind in the middle of writing his book. In fact he left intact the first 27 chapters which he wrote when he believed that the official story about R.F.K.’s assassination was untrue and then he changed his mind very late in the piece and just pivoted and in the final three chapters of his book does a complete about turn and says I was wrong and here’s why I was wrong. At first glance, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was a very straightforward affair in that it happened in the crowded hotel kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. There were 77 people crammed into this very small space and a guy named Sirhan Sirhan pulled out a gun and started firing and plenty of people who were at the scene saw this happen. Kennedy fell to the ground and he was fatally wounded. Sirhan was restrained on the spot by witnesses and he was disarmed, his gun was taken away. Eight bullets had been fired from it. It was an eight-shot revolver. So it appears to be a very straightforward case and you wouldn’t think that conspiracy theories would arise about this shooting since there were so many people who saw Sirhan do it. But in fact, there were conspiracy theories that arose about this case and Dan Moldea when he pitched his book to publishers said, I’m going to prove that the official story is untrue and that even though Sirhan did fire eight shots from his revolver that day all of them missed Kennedy and there was a second shooter in the kitchen who shot Kennedy. In his book proposal, Moldea said, I’ll not only demonstrate that Sirhan’s shots missed, I’ll demonstrate that this second shooter was a security guard named Eugene Cesar, who was seen to draw his gun that day. Moldea was going to prove that it was Cesar’s shots that killed Kennedy. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As he went about writing his book, he zeroed in on all the evidence that appeared to prove this contention. For example, there were minor discrepancies in the eyewitness testimony. Although the coroner said that Bobby Kennedy was shot from a distance of about one inch because he had a giant powder burn near the entrance wound, no witness who saw Sirhan pull the gun saw him put it that close to Kennedy. The witnesses tended to think that he’d fired the shots from about a foot away. To begin with, Moldea found all these discrepancies in the evidence compelling. But what happened as he neared the end of writing his book was that he interviewed the security guard Eugene Cesar and Sirhan Sirhan. And when he interviewed Eugene Cesar, Moldea found that he was very credible. He found that he liked him and he believed what he said, which was that he hadn’t fired any shots in the kitchen that day. He even gave him a lie detector test, which he passed. So at that point, Moldea’s mind is starting to change as he’s writing the book. He’s thinking I’ve been zeroing in on these discrepancies, which have led me to believe that there was a second shooter. But now that I’ve talked to the alleged second shooter, I’m starting to have my doubts. So the final move in his book was to go to the prison that Sirhan was being held in and to interview Sirhan himself. It’s during one of these interviews with Sirhan, his third and final interview, that the scales finally fall from Moldea’s eyes. The way he puts it in the book, he says, “it was like a punch to the jaw and I realized in a flash that this fucking guy has been lying to me all along.” It took that moment of realization for Moldea’s entire perspective to shift and for him to realize that these theories that he’d been clinging to were actually baseless and that the simple explanation of the crime was that Sirhan not only shot Kennedy, but he’d been lying ever since when he claimed to not remember the moment of the shooting and when he claimed that perhaps he’d been brainwashed by somebody as a sort of a Manchurian Candidate to shoot Kennedy. After deciding this in his final chapter, Moldea analyzes where he went wrong. And it’s a really fascinating confession because Moldea admits that he had been complicit in giving Sirhan an incentive to keep lying. Moldea says, as long as there were people like me willing to entertain the conspiratorial theories about the case, Sirhan had an incentive to keep lying. Moldea also realizes that he himself has more or less an economic incentive to deliver the book that he promised to his publishers, that is, a book which will sell well and spread the idea of conspiracy. But Moldea had the ethical decency to say, no, I’m going to write what the truth is, I’m going to renounce my former beliefs. There was a lot of pressure on him to do otherwise, but his publisher finally approved of the book that Moldea delivered. And I really think that readers owe a debt of gratitude to Moldea for not taking the easy path and continuing to perpetuate the conspiratorial narrative, but for writing what he finally realized was the truth."