About 10.000 pages of records related to the 1968 assassination of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy were released yesterday, including handwritten notes from the gunman, who said the Democratic presidential candidate "had to be dealt with" and admitted to being obsessed with killing him.
Many of the files have already been made public, but others have not been digitized and have been sitting in federal government warehouses for decades, the Associated Press (AP) reports. Their release continues a revelation of national secrets ordered by US President Donald Trump.
Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after giving a speech celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary.
His killer, Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence.
The released documents include images of Sirhan's handwritten notes.
"RFK (Robert F. Kennedy) must be disposed of like his brother (John F. Kennedy who was assassinated in 1963)," read the inscription on the front of a blank return-addressed envelope from the Los Angeles County Internal Revenue Service director.
Sirhan also filled a page of a Pasadena City College notebook with variations of "RFK must die" and "RFK must be assassinated."
In a note dated May 18, 1968, he wrote:
"My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming an increasingly unwavering obsession."
In another of the newly released documents, the assassin said he advocated “the overthrow of the current president.” Democrat Lyndon Johnson was in the White House at the time of Robert F. Kennedy's death.
"I don't have absolute plans yet, but I will put them together soon," wrote Sirhan, who pledged support for communist Russia and China.
The newly released files also include notes from interviews with people who knew Sirhan from various contexts, such as schoolmates, neighbors and coworkers.
While some described him as a "friendly, kind and generous person", others described him as a thoughtful and "impressionable" young man who felt strongly about his political beliefs and briefly believed in mysticism.
According to the files, Sirhan told his garbage collector that he planned to kill Kennedy shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
The sanitation worker, a black man, said he planned to vote for Kennedy because he would help black people.
"Well, I disagree. I plan to shoot him," Sirhan replied, the man told investigators.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents describe interviews with a group of tourists who heard rumors that Kennedy had been assassinated weeks before his death.
Several people who visited Israel in May 1968 said that their tour guide told them that Kennedy had been assassinated. One person said that he had heard that there had been an attempt on Kennedy's life in Milwaukee. Another heard that he had been assassinated in Nebraska.
The State Archives and Records Administration has published 229 files containing these records on its public website.
The announcement comes a month after unredacted files linked to the 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy were released.
Those documents gave curious readers more details about the U.S.'s covert Cold War operations in other countries, but they did not lend credence to conspiracy theories about who killed John F. Kennedy.
Trump, a Republican, has championed transparency in the name of releasing documents related to high-profile assassinations and investigations. But he has also been deeply suspicious of government intelligence agencies for years.
The release of once-hidden files opens the door to additional public scrutiny and questions about the operations and conclusions of institutions such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the FBI.
Trump signed an executive order in January calling for the release of government documents related to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., who were killed within two months of each other.
The Kennedy assassin's lawyers have said for decades that he is unlikely to reoffend or pose a danger to society, and in 2021, a parole board deemed Sirhan suitable for release.
But Governor Gavin Newsom overturned the decision in 2022, keeping him in state prison. In 2023, another panel denied his release, saying it still had no insight into what led him to shoot Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of a New York senator who now serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services, praised Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, for their "courage" and "persistent efforts" to release the files.
"Lifting the veil on the 'RFK Papers' is a necessary step toward restoring confidence in the American government," Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement.
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