How RFK was Assassinated w/ Robert F. Kennedy Jr
What this video covers
This clip comes from Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, recorded in June 2023 during Kennedy’s Democratic primary campaign. The full episode ranges across media hostility to his candidacy, Kennedy family lore, civil rights history, vaccines, and his claim that he alone could beat Trump in a debate — but the excerpt that traveled furthest is Kennedy’s telling of his father’s assassination.
Maher, a sympathetic but skeptical interlocutor, lets Kennedy narrate the 1968 killing of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his own terms, including Kennedy’s doubts about the official Sirhan Sirhan account. Maher opens with the conventional case — Sirhan’s diary entry (“Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5th”), the Pasadena Independent article in his pocket — and Kennedy’s sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s view that Sirhan killed their father over his support for Israel. Kennedy disputes it: Sirhan was involved, he says, but “did not fire the shots that killed my father.”
Kennedy traces his distrust to childhood: standing in the East Room of the White House beside his aunt Jackie as his uncle lay in state, watching Lyndon Johnson tell the family that Jack Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald — and thinking, even as a small child, that it made no sense that a man would do that in public knowing it would cost his own life. He names the details that converted him on his father’s case: coroner Thomas Noguchi’s “perfect autopsy” finding all four shots came from behind at contact range, Sirhan’s gun accounted for by its eight bullets hitting five other people, the fallen senator’s hand clutching security guard Eugene Cesar’s clip-on tie, and Sirhan’s defense attorney — who Kennedy notes had been mobster Johnny Roselli’s lawyer and advised the guilty plea while blocking ballistics evidence. The two also trade stories — LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover pranks, the family’s civil-rights-era political courage — that situate Kennedy inside the family mythology he campaigned on.
The conversation touches Kennedy’s vaccine positions (Maher probes but does not fully press him), his argument that liberals have changed, and his pitch that his cross-partisan appeal made him the strongest general-election candidate. It is a useful record of how Kennedy presented himself to a center-left audience at the height of his primary insurgency.
Key points
- Kennedy recounts his father’s assassination in personal, emotional terms — the heart of the clip and the reason for its title.
- He airs his doubts about the official account of the killing, consistent with his long-standing second-shooter claims.
- Maher presses Kennedy on vaccines and his shifting political positioning, with Kennedy arguing the Democratic Party left him rather than the reverse.
- Kennedy claims he was the only candidate who could beat Trump in a debate — a characteristic piece of 2023 campaign bravado.
- The episode captures the early, curious phase of media treatment of Kennedy’s campaign, before coverage hardened into the polarized frames of 2024–2025.