The Good Father (5 page)

In the Senate he became known as the “charity” senator. The bills he sponsored were primarily dedicated to eradicating poverty at home and abroad. He said he would not rest until he had ended childhood starvation in the inner cities. But he was still a prosecutor at heart, and as a result he was not soft on crime or the threat of foreign aggression. He had voted time and again to expand funding for the military, but always insisted on tacking on a provision that earmarked funds and services for veterans. He believed in planning for the future, not just addressing the woes of the present.

Personally, I’d been on the fence about Seagram. It worried me to have a litigator in the White House. As a doctor, I believed that the glut of malpractice lawsuits over the last two decades was the real reason health care had become so expensive in this country. Afraid of being sued, doctors performed unnecessary tests and procedures. We let patients dictate their treatment, hoping to keep our insurance premiums low. I was also concerned that Seagram would raise taxes once he came to power. He had never used the words, but in the spring of 20__, the American economy was still struggling, and Seagram went on TV
calling on Americans to “take responsibility,” which had always been code for accepting a greater financial burden.

I’d be lying, though, if I said the man’s rhetoric and demeanor hadn’t appealed to me. In a sea of milquetoast candidates, Seagram had the spark of greatness, the charisma of a political giant. And I, too, was hungry for some kind of reform.

As the election season deepened, there was little doubt that Seagram would be the Democratic nominee. He had swept the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, had won handily on Super Tuesday. He was a candidate that liberals and moderates—Democratic and Republican, young and old—could feel good about. And so it was he flew into Los Angeles on the morning of June 16 to take meetings with campaign donors and deliver a speech before an audience of college students on the UCLA campus.

His wife came with him. She slept on the flight, her head in his lap. Their two children were home in Helena. It was a school day. Seagram would speak to them via Internet camera moments before going onstage. Later an aide, who was in the room, would describe the scene to a packed congressional hearing. The senator’s children were boisterous, joking. His daughter, Nora, told Daddy he looked tired. His son Neal read him a sonnet he’d written for class.

He said,
Dad, hey Dad. A cow and a squirrel are eating ice cream. The cow says, Like it? I made it myself. The squirrel says, I don’t even want to know how you got the nuts in there
.

Seagram laughed. He said he would be home in the morning, and they would go to the park.
I love you very much
, he told them.

At three fifteen, after an introduction from a celebrated Hollywood actor, Seagram took the stage to a standing ovation.

He was forty-six years old.

My watch read 9:45 p.m. I had been sitting alone for almost thirty minutes. I took out my cell phone, dialed. Murray answered on the second ring.

“Murray, it’s Paul.”

“My God,” he said. “The news.”

“Listen, I need you to call someone in L.A. Danny needs a lawyer.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Murray. “There are so many Republicans to shoot. Why this guy?”

Murray had represented me on two medical malpractice lawsuits. His firm drafted my will and handled my real estate dealings. He was fifty-one, silver-haired, recently divorced. Now he wore mock turtlenecks and boots with his suits. He drove a Porsche. He chased girls young enough to be his daughter.

“He needs a lawyer,” I said. “He’s been shot. I’m not convinced they’re treating him.”

“I’ll make some calls, but a thing like this—”

“The Secret Service came to my house. I’m in an office tower in Stamford. They put me in a room with a sink. What do you think it means?”

“Don’t say another word. I’m getting in the car. My coat is already on.”

“I don’t know the address. It’s somewhere near Green Street.”

“I have a guy I can call. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

“I’m going to call Alverson,” I said.

There was a pause as he thought about this.

“If I were him, I wouldn’t go anywhere near this. Call Ken Sunshine. You’re going to need a publicist.”

“No.”

“Bubby, listen to me. Your son just shot the most popular man in America.”

“He’s innocent.”

“In court, but not in the press. Right now he’s the forest they can burn. There are going to be reporters following you around for months, maybe years. Press conferences. They’re going to blame you for everything. You need counsel. And if Danny’s going to get out of this without getting a lethal injection, we’ll need a sympathetic jury.”

I thought about this. Months of news vans camped out on the lawn, of cops asking questions, of death threats and hate mail. It was overwhelming.

“Get him a lawyer,” I said.

I hung up, dialed the house. Fran answered on the second ring.

“Paul,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. How are the kids?”

“They’re upstairs peeking through the blinds. There are reporters from Spain on the lawn.”

“Spain?”

“From everywhere, CNN, NBC, the BBC. There are so many lights on it looks like nine a.m. outside.”

“Stay indoors. Don’t say anything. I called Murray. He’s on his way.”

“The TV is saying Danny was shot by a police officer. They showed blood on the carpet in the auditorium.”

“He was shot in the leg. I’m working on it.”

I could hear fear in her breathing. We had been together for twelve years. I knew every inch of her.

“Ellen called,” she said. “Your first wife.”

“I know who Ellen is.”

“She wants you to call her.”

“Not now. I have to deal with this.”

“People have been calling the house.”

“People we know?”

“Some. Some we don’t. They don’t have very nice things to say.”

“Don’t answer the phone. I’ll send you a text on your cell when I know something.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I hung up. In the address book on my phone I found the number for Dean Alverson. Dean had been a patient of mine for close to a decade. He suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. His wife and Fran had become friends and we saw them socially from time to time.

Dean had been undersecretary of state under Bill Clinton. He was retired now after a long and distinguished diplomatic career, but if anyone could help me reach my son it was him.

He answered on the first ring.

“Paul,” he said, “I can’t talk to you.”

“He’s my son, Dean. I need to know if he’s okay.”

“He shot a presidential candidate. I assure you, he is being taken care of.”

Not good enough. Every minute that passed took Daniel farther away into some deep dark bureaucratic labyrinth.

“I need more than that,” I said. “They’re calling him a terrorist. He needs a lawyer. He needs a fair chance. There’s no way he did this thing. My son was a liberal Democrat. He belonged to Greenpeace. For Christ’s sake, he worked for the guy in Texas. Does a kid like that shoot a Jay Seagram?”

There was silence for so long I worried we’d been disconnected.

“Stay by the phone,” Alverson told me, and hung up.

Jay Seagram wasn’t the first politician to be killed on a warm June evening in Los Angeles. On June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. It was a few minutes after midnight. He had just won the California primary, and his future as president of the United States seemed assured. Onstage he said, “So thanks to all of you, and it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.” Leaving the stage, Kennedy was led through a nearby pantry and into the ballroom’s kitchen. A small, dark-haired man stepped in front of him and said, “Kennedy, you son of a bitch.” He fired a .22-caliber pistol repeatedly. Kennedy was shot three times: twice in the torso, once in the head.

His attacker was wrestled to the ground by bystanders that included the football player Roosevelt Grier and the writer George Plimpton. Plimpton would later recall that the young man had “enormous, peaceful eyes.”

At Good Samaritan Hospital, Kennedy received blood transfusions. Doctors performed an emergency tracheotomy, then operated on his brain to remove as much of the bullet as possible.

He died twenty-four hours later.

In custody, Kennedy’s assassin refused to give his name. “I wish to remain incognito,” he said. He talked about the stock market and asked philosophical questions about the nature of justice. The suspect was described as “dark-skinned” and “curly-haired.” Some said he was Filipino, others Mexican or Cuban. He was later identified by his brother Adel after a still photograph was shown on television. Kennedy’s killer was named Sirhan Sirhan. He was a Palestinian immigrant, born in
Jerusalem. The fifth son of nine children, Sirhan had immigrated to America at the age of twelve. He was a self-professed anti-Semite and a hater of Israel. He had attended John Muir High School and Pasadena City College. For a short time he had worked at a racetrack in Santa Anita and at a local Pasadena health-food store.

After he was identified, police went to his residence, where they found a detailed notebook containing incriminating statements. In a journal entry dated May 18, 1968, Sirhan wrote:

My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more and more of an unshakable obsession … R.F.K. must die … R.F.K. must be killed … Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68.

Having been raised with a hatred of Israel, his beliefs about the Jews had become increasingly paranoid in the months leading up to the assassination. “The Jews are behind the scenes wherever you go,” he said. He confessed that he was not “psychotic … except when it comes to the Jews.”

Sirhan’s father was a domineering man who had been physically abusive. In 1957, a year after he brought his family to America, he abandoned them and went back to Jordan. Sirhan was thirteen. He never saw his father again.

After the assassination, friends said that Sirhan Sirhan had often expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and his “solution” to the Jewish problem.

Ten years after his father left, on June 5, 1967, Israel and Egypt went to war. Jordan, which had signed a mutual defense treaty with Egypt, attacked Israel from the east. Six days later Israel had gained control of the Sinai peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golan Heights. Egypt and Jordan had lost a war they had no right losing.

That fall Sirhan, unemployed, spent most of his time at the Pasadena public library reading extensively about the Six-Day War. He read the
B’nai B’rith Messenger
so he could keep track of what he called “Zionist intentions.” His anger was like an animal he raised in his bedroom, feeding it, nurturing it, helping it grow.

On May 26, 1968, Robert Kennedy made a speech at a Jewish temple
in Portland, Oregon, supporting the sale of advanced fighter planes to Israel. One week later, on June 4, 1968, Sirhan saw an advertisement announcing a march down Wilshire Boulevard to commemorate the first anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. It was a “big sign, for some kind of fund, or something … a fire started burning in me … I thought the Zionists or Jews or whoever it was were trying to rub it in that they had beat hell out of the Arabs.”

At his trial Sirhan said “that brought me back to the six days in June of the previous year … I was completely pissed off at American justice at the time … I had the same emotionalism, the same feelings, the fire started burning inside me … at seeing how these Zionists, these Jews, these Israelis … were trying to rub in the fact that they had beaten the hell out of the Arabs the year before … when I saw that ad, I was off to go down and see what these sons of bitches were up to.”

After extensive interviews with Sirhan, psychiatrist Dr. George Y. Abe described his political thoughts as irrational. Sirhan, he said, had “paranoid-inclined ideations, particularly in the political sphere, but there is no evidence of outright delusions or hallucinations.”

Defense psychiatrists claimed Sirhan suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was in a dissociative state at the time of the assassination. The prosecution argued that Sirhan’s repeated written exclamations that “R.F.K. must die” showed premeditation and planning.

At trial, Sirhan testified that his feelings toward Robert Kennedy turned to hate when he saw television reports of RFK participating in an Israeli Independence Day celebration. Asked by his lawyer, Grant Cooper, if anyone had put it in his mind that Robert Kennedy was a “bad person,” Sirhan said, “No, no, this is all mine … I couldn’t believe it. I would rather die … rather than live with it … I have the shock of it … the humility and all this talk about the Jews being victorious …”

In April 1968, two months before the assassination, Sirhan spoke of his hatred for RFK to an African American garbage worker he’d befriended. Alvin Clark testified under oath at the trial about Sirhan’s desire to shoot Kennedy.

According to Clark, Sirhan said he’d heard a radio broadcast in which “the announcer said Robert Kennedy was at some Jewish Club or Zionist Club in Beverly Hills.” Kennedy had said, “We are committed to Israel’s survival. We are committed to defying any attempt to destroy Israel,
whatever the source. And we cannot and must not let that commitment waver.” Sirhan left the room putting his hands on his ears and almost weeping.

According to one of his lawyers, after the broadcast Sirhan “was disturbed that both his mother and his brothers did not see Senator Kennedy as the same destructive and malevolent and dangerous person as Sirhan perceived him to be; and I gather that he and his family … had some arguments about this.”

On June 5, 1968, exactly one year after the Six-Year War broke out, Sirhan Sirhan went to the Ambassador Hotel. He waited in the kitchen for Kennedy’s speech to end. And then, as Kennedy made his way through the pantry, Sirhan took an Iver Johnson eight-shot .22-caliber pistol out of his pocket, stepped in front of him, and fired.