by Lisa Pease
If Schulman was correct—and having listened to him on tape, I’m convinced he is telling the truth as he experienced it—where did Cesar’s shot go? No stray bullets were found in the pantry, and no one was wounded who was in front of Kennedy. The most logical explanation is that Cesar did, in fact, hit Kennedy. Sirhan was not shot (despite an early and mistaken report that the suspect had been shot in the leg) and no one else in front of Kennedy had been wounded.
In addition to Uecker and Schulman, one more person also reported seeing Cesar with his gun drawn: Richard Lubic. Lubic had told an interviewer he saw a guard in Cesar’s position with his gun drawn and pointed at the floor after Robert Kennedy fell, which made Lubic upset. Why was the gun pointing toward the fallen Kennedy and not at the suspect? According to Lubic, members of SUS visited his house shortly after that interview and told him not to talk about what he had seen.296 But Lubic’s and Uecker’s assertions about the guard with the gun drawn were whispers in a record that had not yet (in Lubic’s case) or only barely (in Uecker’s case) been made public, whereas Schulman’s assertions were made on camera in Charach’s publicly shown film, so Schulman was the one that needed discrediting.
Bob Kaiser, perhaps motivated by his own desire to be right about Sirhan being only one shooter, evidently took on this task. Kaiser claimed Schulman had never been in the pantry during the shooting. Kaiser pointed to a list of pantry witnesses the LAPD had compiled and noted Schulman wasn’t on it.
But the LAPD’s list was provably incomplete, by their own evidence. An obvious example is Queen Rutledge, who was photographed standing on top of a table in the pantry as the wounded Ira Goldstein was carried out. Rutledge, in a taped interview conducted less than three hours after the shooting, described the events in a way that matched all other pantry witness statements. She even saw Kennedy fall into the arms of Vince DiPierro, something that had not yet been made known by any other witness at that early point. But sloppy and inaccurate interview summaries led the LAPD to believe Rutledge was behind a cameraman who was still in the anteroom just outside the pantry when the shots started, so they left Rutledge off the list.297
Kaiser also used the statements of two CBS coworkers of Schulman from KNXT who told him Schulman hadn’t been in the pantry during the shooting. He even repeated this in his 2008 edition of his book, despite the fact that in the tape of the 1975 interview of Schulman, the LAPD and the D.A.’s office confirmed Schulman’s presence in the pantry during the shooting, assuring him they knew he was in the pantry. Schulman even had blood on his jacket from the shooting. Of course he was in the pantry.
Now, no one researcher knows all the evidence. There are hundreds of hours of tape and hundreds of thousands of pages to read. Everyone misses something. That’s the most innocent explanation for Kaiser’s assertion that Schulman was not in the pantry. It’s not only possible but likely that Kaiser didn’t know that evidence confirming Schulman’s presence in the pantry existed. That said, CBS had one of the closest relationships with the CIA of any media organization during this period. According to Carl Bernstein in his landmark Rolling Stone article “The CIA and the Media” (October 20, 1977):
CBS was unquestionably the CIA’s most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA.
It’s possible that someone in the CIA motivated a couple of CBS employees to feed Kaiser that line of baloney and he fell for it.
And that’s not the only possible explanation for Kaiser’s misinformation. When Kaiser was a correspondent for Time magazine in Rome, his bureau chief, William McHale, had been a CIA operative using his Time role as a cover. During a stint in Beirut, McHale had provided the CIA with a death list of people to be killed in the coup that set Saddam Hussein on his path to power.298
When I asked Kaiser about this a few years back, he expressed disbelief and told me that he didn’t believe his chief had been with the CIA, saying Time’s management wouldn’t have tolerated people on staff working with the CIA. Could Kaiser really not have known that the Time-Life empire of Henry Luce had been one of the closest CIA collaborators at the time, hiring stringers and staffers alike to do their bidding? According to Carl Bernstein, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”299 Carl Bernstein elaborated on this point:
For many years, Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc., vice president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s. Jackson, whose TimeLife service was interrupted by a one-year White House tour as an assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower, approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with TimeLife cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe.300
Kaiser himself had originally been recruited into the Time-Life empire by Clare Boothe Luce.301 After President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, C.D. Jackson, then working for Life magazine, had purchased the famous Zapruder film which showed Kennedy’s head exploding in a way that suggested a shot from the front, while Lee Harvey Oswald had been well behind Kennedy. Jackson and Life, after publishing frames from the film—out of order—kept the film hidden from the public for more than a decade. Indeed, it was only when Kaiser’s good friend Robert Groden showed a copy of the Zapruder film to the public on the Geraldo Rivera show that the film first saw the light of day. Surely Groden would have clued Kaiser in to Jackson’s CIA connections, which had been made public decades before my conversation with Kaiser on this point.
It would be easier to believe Kaiser was covering for the CIA, which had been quietly involved behind the scenes in the LAPD’s investigation, as you will see in a later chapter, than to believe that this veteran reporter, decades later, could still have still been so ignorant of the CIA’s relationships with Time-Life and CBS. If Kaiser had some relationship with the CIA, that would explain his reliance on two CBS people to attempt to discredit Schulman. It would explain why his first reaction was to encourage Cesar to sue. It would also explain why, over the years, Kaiser attempted to sandbag some of the other researchers who reported on the conspiracy aspects of the Robert Kennedy assassination. For instance, Bill Turner, who co-wrote an excellent book on the case with Jonn Christian, talked of how Kaiser tried to frame Christian on an evidence tampering charge. Turner wrote it off to professional jealousy. But given Kaiser’s work for the Luce Press, other interpretations cannot be dismissed out of hand.
On June 4, 1971, Charach filed a lawsuit against the LAPD, Chief Davis, Chief Houghton, and D.A. Evelle Younger for the suppression of their files. He opened by quoting state law:
The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.302
Charach charged that each defendant had “deliberately, intentionally and knowingly suppressed facts and evidence within their knowledge and control, and continue to do so, usurping the right of the People to remain informed and on the part of said defendants, and each of them, attempting to decide what is good for the People to know and what is not good for them to know.”303
With Harper, Blehr and Char
ach making public affidavits and taking legal steps, and accusations from Don Schulman of a second shooter, Joseph P. Busch, Jr., who was appointed to the role of District Attorney when Younger became the California State Attorney General in 1971, ordered his deputies to investigate the recent charges against Wolfer. Busch announced there would be a press conference in a week but then delayed this twice, presumably because the charges could not immediately be answered, since Wolfer had no evidence to back up his assertions.
In the process of investigating the charges against Wolfer, the D.A.’s office also quietly questioned both Schulman and Cesar, as well as a few others. In other words, while publicly stating otherwise, Busch and his team appeared to be looking to tie up any loose ends regarding a conspiracy, not just to answer the specific charges against Wolfer.
Busch also charged that the evidence in the County Clerk’s office might have been tampered with and convened a grand jury in 1971 to look into it, an idea perhaps inspired by Bob Kaiser. In 1971, Kaiser “had been put on the D.A.’s payroll as the house “expert” on the investigation” to “monitor the activities of the ‘buffs.’”304 This would have made little sense, given Kaiser’s role with Sirhan’s defense team. Why did Busch think he could trust Kaiser? Here again, if Kaiser had some sort of connection with the CIA, that would have made more sense. According to Turner and Christian,
Kaiser took the position that if the bullets didn’t match as Harper claimed, then they probably had been tampered with or possibly even switched by unauthorized persons. It was almost verbatim the line that Busch would soon make public.305
Harper’s findings could have been washed away if the D.A.’s office could prove someone from the outside had gotten in there and switched the bullets. But that effort fell short. As mentioned earlier, Kaiser tried at this point to implicate Jonn Christian with having tampered with evidence, but Christian had already found the evidence against him had been forged, and the case against him was quickly dropped. There was never any evidence that anyone from the outside had tampered with the evidence.306
The D.A.’s office motive for covering up wrongdoing by Wolfer was similar to the LAPD’s. To admit fallibility or deliberate misconduct would open the D.A.’s office to a number of lawsuits over false convictions. Wolfer had presented evidence in many cases over the years. Therefore, to let the D.A. investigate, in essence, itself and its partner agency was, in retrospect, ridiculous. To believe the government can ever successfully investigate itself when so much is at stake is to deny the realities of human and bureaucratic nature. Even appointed “special counsels” cannot help, as we will see shortly, because they are appointed by the very bodies involved in the cases they are investigating.
Wolfer’s behavior in the Robert Kennedy case was so clearly understood by the rank and file within the LAPD that his name became a term of derision in the years that followed, as the Los Angeles Times reported years later:
“There is a nickname in our profession,” one specialist said, for mistakes in which an investigator is too quick to “make” a gun. It is “Wolferism,” a reference to DeWayne Wolfer, a one-time LAPD criminalist who misread evidence in the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968….307
Nevertheless, despite all the problems with Wolfer’s mishandling of the evidence, his lack of any documentation to back up claims of a match between bullets, and his lab’s destruction of evidence, Busch officially cleared Wolfer, and Wolfer became head of the LAPD’s lab, claiming he was clearly qualified for the job.
But wishing didn’t make it so. In 1974, Wolfer was reprimanded for “alleged improper conduct” in a case where members of the LAPD apparently tried to pressure the Civil Service Board into appointing specific people to the LAPD’s crime lab. In 1980, Chief Daryl Gates suspended Wolfer for 30 working days without pay after an internal investigation revealed he had “failed to provide proper storage and analysis of bullets and other evidence” in another case.308 And in a strange twist—or not—in later years, Wolfer went on to become the president of the very same Ace Security guard service that had sent Thane Cesar to the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert Kennedy was killed.
There are any number of improbable explanations for Wolfer’s behavior. But there is one scenario in which all of this, Wolfer’s actions, his protection, and his later employment make sense: Wolfer had deliberately covered up evidence of multiple shooters in an important crime and was protected and rewarded for doing so, regardless of whether he ever knew whom—or what—he was protecting.
On May 15, 1972, Arthur Bremer fired upon the racist, conservative Democratic presidential primary candidate Governor George Wallace during a campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. As I wrote for Probe magazine nearly two decades ago,
Wallace alone was wounded in nine different places. Three other people were wounded by a bullet apiece. … The gun found at the scene and presumed to be the only weapon used could only hold five bullets. Looks like someone brought magic bullets to Laurel that day.309
The New York Times timidly noted there was “broad speculation on how four persons had suffered at least seven separate wounds from a maximum of five shots.” There was an enormous amount of evidence that multiple gunmen had fired upon Wallace that day. But as with the Sirhan case, it was all neatly buttoned up and pinned on a single man, despite the fact that the bullets retrieved from Wallace could not be matched to the gun recovered, and Bremer’s fingerprints were not found on the gun he had ostensibly fired. Like Sirhan, Bremer was reported to have had a “silly grin” and to appear “incredibly indifferent to what was going on around him.”310
Nixon’s team had feared Wallace. Wallace was very popular, and had he chosen to run as an independent in the general election, a consideration that was floated at the time, his conservative, racist views would have cut more into Nixon’s support than George McGovern’s. If anyone had a motive to remove Wallace from the race, it was Nixon and his backers.
A month later, a “third-rate burglary”311 at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in D.C. by current and former CIA operatives, at the behest of the White House, began a chain of events that would not only cause President Nixon to step down but would launch five separate investigations into what the CIA was doing domestically and what its role might have been in assassinations not only abroad but at home as well.312
In Los Angeles, a number of independent researchers pursued their own investigations into the case in the 1970s. Lillian Castellano, then in her sixties, was the first to notice the problem with too many bullets in the pantry. She had already been studying the assassination of President Kennedy when Senator Robert Kennedy was killed, so she paid closer attention than most. When she read that there were two bullet holes in the center frame of the swinging doors in the pantry, she recognized immediately those represented two more bullets than Sirhan’s gun could hold. The Los Angeles Free Press published her findings on May 23, 1969, shortly after Sirhan’s trial had ended.
Art Kevin of KMPC did a number of interviews of people with evidence that did not support the official story. While at KHJ Radio, he had upset then-D.A. Evelle Younger by enumerating the evidence that pointed to conspiracy in the Robert Kennedy assassination. Younger had threatened to revoke Kevin’s press credentials, but when KHJ backed their reporter and promised to expose Younger’s threat, Younger backed down.
While at KMPC, on December 20, 1974, Kevin interviewed Paul Sharaga, the LAPD officer who had set up the command post immediately after the assassination, about what had happened. Sharaga had responded within “less than 30 seconds from the time the call came out” about the shooting. He was just passing the back of the Ambassador Hotel and quickly turned in to the “upper level rear parking lot.” There, according to Sharaga, he met a couple whose name he did not remember:
An older couple, probably in their fifties—fifties to sixties—came running toward me and I stopped them and asked what had happened. They related that
they were outside one of the doors to the Embassy Room, when a couple in their early twenties came rushing out. This couple seemed to be in a state of glee, shouting ‘We shot him! We shot him! We killed him!’—The only description I could get out of this couple were that they were in their early twenties. The woman was wearing a polka dot dress.
Sharaga told Kevin he had given the couple’s names to the investigating detectives at Rampart and specifically mentioned Bill Jordan. Sharaga then said he broadcast a description of the girl and her male companion. But from the transcript of the broadcasts made by Sharaga and others that night, it appears the only suspect Sharaga called in a description of was his tall, sandy-haired male suspect. In addition, Sharaga told Kevin that, after he had broadcast a description of the girl in the polka dot dress, Inspector Powers came on the air and shut him down. The police transcripts show Powers shut Sharaga down in exactly the manner he described, but after Sharaga had broadcast his description of the tall blond man. I asked audio expert Philip Van Praag if the police tapes could have been altered. No, he said. He explained that all police channels were recorded simultaneously on one big machine, with time checks inside, so it would have been virtually impossible for someone to fake all the channels at the same time. I believe, therefore, that Sharaga conflated two separate events in his head and reported them as a single event.
There is a record that indicates Sharaga did in fact meet the couple he described. A report of an LAPD interview with Sharaga on September 26, 1968, indicates that Sharaga had met a couple who were extremely upset because they believed they heard a woman run by saying “We shot him, we shot him.”313 When asked who had been shot, the woman indicated Kennedy. Sharaga said the couple had been standing on the balcony outside the Embassy Room. Sharaga also told me when I contacted him by phone years later, and I found him very credible on this point, that he had not heard of Sandra Serrano’s story until several years after the assassination. He had not seen her broadcast live, it was never aired again, and he was not involved in Special Unit Senator’s investigation. The balcony outside the Embassy Room was a few feet above and east of where Serrano had been on the fire escape. Someone could easily have overheard Serrano’s exchange with the girl in the polka dot dress from that location. The report indicates that Sharaga passed the couple’s information along to another officer.