Death Without Dread

What the Latin American male calls machismo, a hypersensitive awareness of his own masculinity, is rujuliyah to an Arab. When payment for a wrong must be exacted in blood, it is rujuliyah that steels the avenger's hand. It is rujuliyah that can rob death of its dread. It was perhaps ruj#363;liyah that took Sirhan Bishara Sirhan to a serving pantry in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel last June and there cost Senator Robert Kennedy his life. And it was ruj#363;liyah that attorneys for the young Jordanian assassin were forced above all to battle in their efforts last week to spare him from the death penalty.

First, Sirhan's lawyers had to overcome his determination to seek death in California's gas chamber, even though his suicidal outbursts were silenced in court by Judge Herbert V. Walker (TIME, March 7). It was not, it transpired, that Sirhan objected to the prosecution's having read from his notebook diaries the passages recounting his resolve to kill Kennedy, an essential element of the prosecution's contention that he acted with premeditated malice. Sirhan would actually have preferred to die rather than subject his family to what he deemed the public shame of an airing of his sexual fantasies--scrawled comments about girls he scarcely knew. This, and a revelation of his low IQ violated his sense of ruj#363;liyah. "We may be mad as hell at each other," Sirhan's younger brother Munir explained, "but we never show it to outsiders."

Like a Saint. To Sirhan's trio of defense attorneys, there was the nightmare prospect of a repetition of his earlier psychic detonations. When they promised not to call as witnesses the girls named in his diaries, Sirhan became glib and almost ingratiating when he spoke of the man he had killed. When he first glimpsed his victim two days before the assassination, Sirhan had thought of Kennedy as looking "like a saint." Yet three weeks earlier, his admiration for the Senator had turned to vitriolic hate. "If he were in front of me," Sirhan declared last week, relating the incident to the jury, "so help me God, he would have died right then and there!" The reason: Sirhan discovered that Kennedy had been friendly to Israel since that nation was founded in 1948.

Sirhan's 56-year-old mother, Mary Sirhan, helped explain her son's rage, telling of a baby born in Jerusalem amid the turmoil of war-torn Palestine. When Arab fought Jew in 1948, the street before their home became a barbed-wire no-man's-land. As a toddler, Sirhan had witnessed a terrorist bombing, and one of his brothers was killed by a car speeding to outrun hostile gunfire. From modest comfort, the family was reduced to the mindless misery of refugees. It was, Sirhan insisted, a tragedy that had transformed him into a rootless being, even after he reached the U.S. in 1957. "I always felt that I had no country," he declared to the court last week when he took the witness stand in his own defense. "I wanted a place of my own where the people would speak my own language, where they would eat my own food, where I could share my own politics and my own--something that I could identify as Arab, a Palestinian Arab, and have my own country, my own city, my own land, my own business and my own everything."

Selected Lapses. Defense witnesses testified that a head injury Sirhan suffered in 1966, when he fell from a horse, caused his personality to change; he became solitary and withdrawn. He dabbled in the mystic philosophy of the Rosicrucian cult and revealed that his stream-of-consciousness writings about killing Kennedy before June 5 were inspired by a sermonizing article titled "Put It in Writing" in a Rosicrucian magazine. "Pick a goal," the article had exhorted. "Set a target date. Now start working to make it come true."

Did Sirhan admit that he had shot Kennedy? It was Defense Lawyer Grant Cooper who asked the question. "Yes, sir, I did," replied Sirhan. But his memory of the murder, he insisted, was a blank. He recalled having coffee with a beautiful girl at Kennedy's campaign headquarters. "The next thing I remember, sir, I was being choked." To the defense, such lacunae in Sirhan's story are a source of worry. They believe a full rationale for the killing, however illogical, would give greater credence to their defense of insanity or diminished responsibility. Moreover, Prosecutor Lynn Compton, a dogged questioner, has already begun to pick at the curious lapses in Sirhan's highly selective memory.

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