The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991
This book methodically and meticulously analyzes the evidence about the 1968 Robert Kennedy assassination, reopening the question of possible alternatives to the officially accepted version of Sirhan Sirhan as the lone gunman. Melanson, a political science professor and author of Spy Saga ( LJ 11/1/90), sifts through a mass of documents and reinterviews witnesses to the event and participants in the original Los Angeles police investigation. He finds huge suspicious gaps in the police file and missing tapes, and he identifies unsettling irregularities in the police investigation. Melanson's conclusion is circumstantial, but cogently argued: Sirhan was programmed by someone (a group?) opposed to Kennedy (the author suggests possibilities), and the conspirators may have been present at the shooting and even taken part in it. By so effectively discrediting both the motives of the police and the entire investigatory process, Melanson makes the outlandish almost believable. Melanson wrote about the RFK assassination files in "The Politics of Public Disclosure," LJ , Feb. 1, p. 54-56.--Ed.- Jack Forman, Mesa Coll., San DiegoCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.