10,000 pages of records about Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 assassination released

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WASHINGTON — About 10,000 pages of records related to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were released Friday, including handwritten notes by the gunman, who said the Democratic presidential candidate "must be disposed of" and acknowledged an obsession with killing him.

Many of the files had been made public previously, but others had not been digitized and sat for decades in federal government storage facilities. Their release continued the disclosure of historical investigation documents ordered by President Donald Trump.

Kennedy was fatally shot on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after giving a speech celebrating his victory in California's presidential primary. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving life in prison.

The files included pictures of handwritten notes by Sirhan.

"RFK must be disposed of like his brother was," read the writing on the outside of an empty envelope, referring to Kennedy's older brother, President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. The return address was from the district director of the Internal Revenue Service in Los Angeles.

Sirhan also filled a page of a Pasadena City College notebook with variations of "R.F.K must die" and "R.F.K must be killed." In a note dated May 18, 1968, he wrote: "My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more of an unshakable obsession."

In another of the documents, the assassin said he advocated for "the overthrow of the current president." Democrat Lyndon Johnson was in the White House at the time of Robert F. Kennedy's death.

"I have no absolute plans yet, but soon will compose them," wrote Sirhan, who pledged support for communist Russia and China.

The files also included notes from interviews with people who knew Sirhan from a wide variety of contexts, such as classmates, neighbors and coworkers. While some described him as "a friendly, kind and generous person" others depicted a brooding and "impressionable" young man who felt strongly about his political convictions 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 don't agree. I am planning on shooting the son of a bitch," Sirhan replied, the man told investigators.

FBI documents describe interviews with a group of tourists who had heard rumors about Kennedy being shot weeks before his death. Several people who visited Israel in May 1968 said a tour guide told them Kennedy had been shot. One person said he heard that an attempt on Kennedy's life had been made in Milwaukee. Another heard that he was shot in Nebraska.

The National Archives and Records Administration posted 229 files containing the pages to its public website.

The release comes a month after unredacted files related to the assassination of President Kennedy were disclosed. Those documents gave curious readers more details about Cold War-era covert U.S. operations in other nations but did not initially lend credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.

Trump, a Republican, has championed in the name of transparency the release of documents related to high-profile assassinations and investigations. But he's also been deeply suspicious for years of the government's intelligence agencies. His administration's release of once-hidden files opens the door for more public scrutiny of the operations and conclusions of institutions such as the 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 King, who were killed within two months of each other.

Lawyers for Kennedy's killer 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 Gov. Gavin Newson rejected the decision in 2022, keeping him in state prison. In 2023, a different panel denied him release, saying he still lacks insight into what caused him to shoot Kennedy.

Kennedy remains an icon for liberals, who see him as a champion for human rights who also was committed to fighting poverty and racial and economic injustice. They often regard his assassination as the last in a series of major tragedies that put the U.S. and its politics on a darker, more conservative path.

He was a sometimes divisive figure during his lifetime. Some critics thought he came late to opposing the Vietnam War, and he launched his campaign for president in 1968 only after the Democratic primary in New Hampshire exposed President Johnson's political weakness.

While Kennedy's campaign inspired hope among some Democrats, he still trailed Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey for the party's presidential nomination after winning the California primary.

Kennedy's older brother appointed him U.S. attorney general, and he remained a close aide to him until JFK's assassination in Dallas. In 1964, he won a U.S. Senate seat from New York and was seen as the heir to the family's political legacy.

One of his sons, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now serves as the health and human services secretary. He commended Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, for their "courage" and "dogged efforts" to release the files.

"Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government," the health secretary said in a statement.

Contributing: Holly Ramer, Eric Tucker, Juan Lozano, John Hanna, Safiyah Riddle and Corey Williams

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