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As a Los Angeles newspaper reporter, Fernando Faura investigated the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, confronting the coverup by the FBI and local police. He just published The Polka Dot File, and joins us to talk about it.
Faura was a reporter for the defunct Hollywood Citizens News who pursued many angles of the RFK murder investigation, and his new book reads like a series of dispatches, as he tracked the mysterious woman in the polka dot dress.
Faura interviewed a chemical salesman, John Fahey, who spent the afternoon on the day before the assassination with the woman in question, and she dropped clear hints that she knew people who were planning to “take care of” RFK. At the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the murder, witnesses placed her with Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted as the lone shooter, and two other men. They were seen in the kitchen area as Kennedy passed through.
Faura builds the case of the “Manchurian Candidate”, and argues that Sirhan–who practiced self-hypnosis–was under the hypnotic control of the woman in the polka dot dress when he fired at Kennedy. Witnesses reported seeing her running from the scene, crying out “We shot him. We shot him.” When a campaign worker asked, “Who did you shoot?”, the woman replied, “Senator Kennedy”.
Faura goes on to link the mystery woman to Anna Chenault, a powerful Nixon supporter, and Chenault’s contacts with the ambassador from South Vietnam just before Nixon won the 1968 election–contacts now viewed as treason.
And, Faura thinks, the Watergate break-in was driven by Nixon’s fears that Democrats had uncovered his role in the RFK killing.
For more, visit Faura’s Facebook page.