Understanding the RFK Assassination Through a Jordanian Lens
I ran into this topic again recently when someone asked me about Sirhan Bishara Sirhan on a history forum. People tend to treat the June 5, 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as purely an American political event, but the layers around it are more complicated than most people realize. I spent years digging into Middle Eastern political archives and legal documents, and I have to say the Jordanian angle is one of the most overlooked aspects of this case. Sirhan was born in Los Angeles to Palestinian Christian parents who had emigrated from Bethlehem. He held a Jordanian passport at the time of the assassination, which became a significant detail during his trial and has been discussed extensively in subsequent legal analyses. The Jordanian government at the time, under King Hussein, was navigating an extremely precarious position. They had just emerged from the June War, also known as the Six-Day War, and were dealing with the fallout of large-scale Palestinian refugee populations within Jordan's borders. What most people do not immediately connect is that the assassination happened against a backdrop where Jordan itself was at a defining crossroads. The Palestinian factions operating from Jordan were beginning to challenge state authority, a dynamic that would eventually escalate into Black September in 1970. The RFK assassination removed one of the few American politicians who had expressed nuanced understanding of the Palestinian displacement issue and who was actively working on Middle East peace initiatives. That void had consequences.
When I was researching the diplomatic cables from that period, I found that Jordanian officials were privately worried about how the assassination would be interpreted back home and in the broader Arab world. Some saw it as an attack on a figure who might have been sympathetic to their cause. Others recognized it could trigger harsh American policy shifts. I spent about three weeks tracking down declassified documents from the Reagan-era FOIA requests that referenced Jordanian embassy communications from 1968 to 1970. The language was carefully hedged, which is typical for diplomatic correspondence, but the underlying anxiety was readable if you knew where to look. One thing that comes up often in discussions about this case and that beginners consistently miss is the assumption that Sirhan acted entirely alone without any external coordination. The evidence on that point is genuinely ambiguous. Multiple witnesses reported that Sirhan fired multiple shots and that at least one other person may have fired as well. The ballistic evidence showed seven bullets hit Kennedy, but only five came from Sirhan's .22 caliber revolver. This has been documented in the official coroner's report and in the subsequent litigation, but it gets hand-waved in most popular accounts. I encountered this exact issue when a documentary production company wanted me to verify a claim they were making. I had to explain that the single-gun theory was the prosecution's position at trial, but the alternative theory regarding additional shooters has never been definitively disproven and remains a subject of legitimate legal debate. Another practical detail that matters: Sirhan's Jordanian citizenship was a factor in how the case was handled internationally. Jordan initially refused to cooperate fully with the investigation, citing sovereignty concerns. This was not unusual for the time period. Many Arab states were deeply suspicious of American legal processes and did not trust that a Jordanian national would receive fair treatment. The resulting delays in obtaining certain evidence and documents from Jordan are noted in the trial transcripts and added complications that the defense team had to work around.
The broader impact on Jordan cannot be overstated. After RFK's death, his proposed Middle East initiative lost its most powerful champion in the American political system. The momentum that might have led to a different diplomatic outcome dissipated. Jordan continued on the path that would lead to the 1970 conflict with Palestinian militant groups, the eventual expulsion of those groups to Lebanon, and decades of political recalibration. Some historians argue that RFK might have pursued a different approach to the Palestinian question than what ultimately materialized, but that is speculative and I should be clear about that. If you are looking into this topic further, the primary sources are scattered. The trial records are available through the California state archives. The FBI files on Sirhan were released in stages under the Freedom of Information Act, with the final batches coming out in the early 2000s. I recommend starting with the 1969 trial transcript if you want to understand the original prosecution case, and then moving to the civil wrongful death lawsuits from the 1980s and 1990s, which introduced new evidence and theories that were not admissible at the criminal trial. The gap between those two bodies of evidence is where most of the controversy lives. The main pitfall people run into is conflating the historical facts of what happened at the Ambassador Hotel with the decades of conspiracy theories that accumulated afterward. The confirmed facts are relatively straightforward. Sirhan Sirhan shot RFK. He was convicted. He remains in prison. Everything else exists on a spectrum of interpretation and speculation. I have seen too many people present theoretical reconstructions as established fact, so I always try to keep the distinction clear in my own work.
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