Michael R. Fischbach, "I Did It for My Country: Sirhan Sirhan, Palestine, and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Thank you.

That was an amazing background, and as you mentioned, I think it's still a very contentious point to discuss this in the United States.

Before we get to talk about the book, I must say that I didn't know Sirhan Sirhan, and when I saw the book on the Internet first, I kind of confused Robert F. Kennedy with JF Kennedy and said, oh, I didn't know JF Kennedy's assassin was a Palestinian.

But quickly, it took me a few, a couple of minutes, you know, to realize you were talking about a different character.

But I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who don't know this historical event, especially if they're not from America.

So just to set the scene, tell us what happened.

Who was Robert F. Kennedy? Who was Sirhan Sirhan? Tell us about that assassination, and then we'll get to talk about the book in more detail, in more depth.

Certainly.

Robert F. Kennedy was one of three Kennedy brothers who entered politics in the United States starting in the 1950s and 1960s.

His elder brother, John F. Kennedy, of course, became president and was himself tragically

assassinated in November 1963.

Thereafter, Robert Kennedy, who had served as his brother's attorney general, ran for the Senate in the year after his brother was killed, that is to say in 1964, he ran successfully and was a senator from the state of New York.

And at the time of his assassination in June 1968, he was running for president.

President Lyndon Johnson famously announced in March 1968 that he was not going to seek re-election, which was fairly unprecedented in American history.

It recently happened again with President Biden.

And so Robert Kennedy was running for president.

He was in the Democratic Party's primaries, which would determine at that party's convention which candidate they would put up for president.

And the state, and this is true even today, that has the most delegates to the Democratic Party's convention is the state of California.

And on June 4th, 1968, in a race against another candidate running for the Democratic Party, he, Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy won, and he was at a victory celebration, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, when he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.

So that's a bit about Robert Kennedy.

He was, at the time of his assassination, very, very popular among various constituencies within the Democratic Party.

Blacks, Latinos, many progressive whites.

And one reason why his assassination really devastated the country.

Well, first of all, it occurred two months, literally almost two months to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

but also because many people put so many hopes in Robert F. Kennedy.