I feel hated, don't understand why. I know that I'm infamous and hated. I understand the reasons for being hated, but I really have no appreciation for myself, sir, for being so.

This is Sirhan Sirhan's first televised interview. It's 1969, just after his conviction for the murder of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

You had never seen Senator Kennedy? No, sir. You knew about him? Yes, sir. I loved him, sir. I thought he was the prince there. He was the hope of all the poor people of this country there, minorities.

So when you heard Senator Kennedy on the radio, was it? Talk about sending Jeff Barber to Israel. He heard a report about it.

I had to report about it and it wasn't unreal to me. I couldn't picture Robert Kennedy wanting to do that.

During Kennedy's presidential campaign, he had pledged to support Israel by sending them Jeff Barber's.

He seemed like a villain to me, like a man who was to kill, like a man who was to throw those bombs in the people, destroy. I couldn't believe it.

And Sirhan said that this betrayal was the reason he killed Kennedy.

Are there people in many countries who seem to consider you as the hero of the murder? Yes. You think you have accomplished something? What?

I think that the world has known that 20 years of suffering, deprivation, injustice, with the Palestinian Arab people, so there's enough.

Do you think your case has brought this to their attention? I think whatever little attention it has brought to its worth it.

My life is regrettably Mr. Kennedy.

But this version of Sirhan, the political assassin, is very different from the confused quiet man he was in the weeks before his trial.

When he told a psychiatrist, my own conscience doesn't agree with what I did.

Well, conscience doesn't agree with me what I did. You're unconscious. I'm unconscious of nothing. And what?

It's against my upbringing, my mother and nature, my mother and my whole my childhood, you know, my family, the church, the brothers, the wives, the boys, the dogs are not killed.

The ethics of life, the realities of life. And here I go with the spread of the sky, the phrase is just not me.

And here I go and splatter this guy's brains. It's just not me.

So who was Sirhan Sirhan? Both his own lawyers and the prosecution agreed that he was the man who shot Senator Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5th, 1968.

No one, not even Sirhan's lawyers, were asking questions about gun positioning or extra bullets and door frames.

With the who, what, where and when of the case agreed upon by both sides, the only thing left to figure out was why?

I'm Zach Stewart-Pantier and you're listening to the RFK tapes.

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