Politico is an interesting American news website. Interesting, because why would anybody follow them? Their investigative journalism is not notable. They are reliably biased towards the American status quo. Their op-eds have produced some true clangers, like a heartfelt defense of Donald Rumsfeld, invader of Iraq.
The D.C. elites still read Politico, and that’s the self-fulfilling draw. If you’re a high-up in American politics, and you want to leak to the media, and ensure your peers see what you have to say, go to Politico. So I follow them to keep an eye on the US, and that’s how a headline got my nose the other day. Let’s analyse what’s involved in an op-ed, shall we?
“‘How Robert F. Kennedy’s Assassination Derailed American Politics’ - The idealistic presidential candidate was on the verge of seizing control of the 1968 race just as Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet struck”. This may seem like just another historical retrospective, like they occasionally do, and which I wish we’d see more of in the media). But I think I see deeper implications, and a read within confirms it.
Before the piece actually gets to discussing those historical events, we get this preface: “no surprise that most of Bobby’s children are outraged by California’s recent recommendation to parole his assassin. Sirhan Sirhan may seem like a character plucked from the confounding chaos of the 1960s, one with little relevance to our current moment. But revisiting the campaign he upended, it’s clear not just why his potential freedom is generating such furor, but also why his is a story of today.”
Sirhan Sirhan has been in prison since 1968. A prison board recently recommended his parole. The complication is that this is not a decision left solely to unelected public servants, presented as a fait accompli to the public. To be valid, the Democrat Governor of California, Gavin Newsom needs to sign off on this.
Newsom is currently in a very unusual situation, being only the third governor to face an attempted “recall” election in American history. (The last recall also happened in California, and Republican Arnold Schwarznegger beat a Democrat.) Petitioners have forced a referendum on his leadership, and if he loses, he’s sacked, immediately.
The rarity of the event makes the outcome unpredictable. There are few polls to point to an outcome: what polls have been conducted show the race narrowed before Newsom rebuilt his lead, but they’ve been off before and could be off again, because pollsters have had so little practice on this kind of election. Who will actually turn up on the day to vote, amidst COVID and conspiracies of electoral fraud, is something of a mystery.
Newsom has had scandals and complications in confronting problems like the pandemic, notably violating lockdown regulations to dine out at a restaurant that charges a disgusting minimum $350 and high-end $1,200 per person. Homeless Californians are still suffering, as are those in the path of the wildfires, and these are just to name a few issues.
His opponents see him as the embodiment of all they despise around liberalism. To pardon Sirhan Sirhan, at this time, may make him look “soft on crime”, a perennial fear of left-of-centre politicians, and provide a ready-made attack line. Liberals have gone so far left that they’ll pardon the assassins of their own champions!
With that context in mind, you may still say that this article is simply written for clicks and out of curiosity. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that the author intends to influence Newsom’s choice, to discourage him from making that pardon. If so, that is disturbing. We all know the problem with the US is not that they let too many people out of prison, but that they keep finding reasons to keep them there. Put plainly, it just doesn’t look right or sit right with me to argue to keep a brown man in prison for his 54th year running.
Sirhan deserves a pardon. Assassins of public figures deserve longer sentences than regular murderers to deter assassination as a viable sociopolitical act. To be in prison for over five decades for anything short of a massacre or horrifically traumatising serial behaviour s deeply unjust. I agree with those of Bobby’s children who thought their own dad would support his pardon by this point.
The parole board are professionals who have already determined he can safely walk free. With all the fame to his name, we know that’s not a decision that they would make lightly. He claims to be an old and weary man, who regrets his hot-headed decisions as a politically outraged youth. That’s fair enough.
What is especially worth noting is that he didn’t assassinate RFK because that candidate was a raging liberal, he shot him for supporting military aid to Israel. This shouldn’t factor either way into his release. Why this matters is that the motive proves how irrelevant it is to list Bobby’s virtues when implicitly lobbying against Sirhan’s release.
Sirhan didn’t make a martyr of him, or kill him for standing up for what he believed in; supporting Israel with military aid was nowhere near the top of Bobby’s passions or priorities. Posting historical counterfactuals and hypotheticals is telling fiction about “what could have been”, while a real man sits in prison day after day. It’d be just as irrelevant to write an article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and use it as justification for why Sirhan should be paroled. In fact, that’d probably be more relevant in actually explaining the event.
The counterfactuals are a load of nonsense, anyway. Whatever your personal view of Robert Kennedy, it’s well-known amongst historians that there are disputed characterisations of him. He could have been a bleeding-heart liberal and the last greatest hope for ending poverty and advancing civil rights in America. This in no way gels with keeping a man in prison for over half a century.
He also could have been a hard-nosed, heartless political operator. Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned in Georgia in 1960 for his activism, endangering his life due to the threat of white lynch mobs. After advisers convinced JFK to ring Coretta Scott King and offer his support, and to make a public statement demanding his release, the allegation runs that Bobby found out, raged and stormed at those advisers, and bemoaned that they’d lost Jack the election.
Even if he was a good man, the article’s argument that he would have won the presidential nomination and been able to make something of his beliefs is very likely untrue. The voters won him a narrow victory of a few percentage points in California - not clear-cut, as the article inanely claims. Their votes did not matter in that day and age. Party bosses still would’ve sent Vice-President Hubert Humphrey out to lose to Nixon.
The problem is that the vast majority of readers don’t know nor care about this ancient history. They’re just showing up to have their heartstrings tugged. And then they angrily call the governor’s office, or talk to their mates who work for him, and they plead for no parole. Ironically, this article is an appeal to the exact sort of insider decision-making and lobbying that would have put Bobby’s potential on ice.
I can’t do anything to affect events in America, and what happens to this one assassin is not the most important thing in the world. Rather, I found this interesting to dissect mentally because it’s an example of how to analyse the news on a deeper level. (Technically, an opinion piece isn’t the news, but it’s not as if people don’t pick up information on current events from them. I certainly hope that I have helped to inform people.)
Remember how NCEA History made you go, again and again, over the relevance and the usefulness of sources? This is how you can employ it in the real world, in a natural way that ends up making what you’re reading far more interesting, rather than sucking all the life out of it. Out of context, this is just an article, that describes an assassination of an idealised man, in another country, over half a century ago.
Look at what place the inspiration came from, what is said and what is left unspoken. Think about what they’re trying to achieve. When you do, you feel the heartbreak and the hope. This is the latest step in a saga that stretches from history into the news coming out of California these days. If you learn these sorts of skills - and, admittedly, the endless mishmosh of largely useless information that let you pick up on these background details - you can get a lot more out of your daily or weekly check of the news. That seems worth it to me.
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