It was in the early hours of 5 June 1968 that the US presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot three times by a Palestinian gunman, Sirhan Sirhan. Bobby, the younger brother of John F. Kennedy, who was himself murdered some five years earlier, succumbed to his wounds twenty-six hours later.

For more than fifty years the subject of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination has remained in the news as conspiracy writers, assisted by the ruminations of Hollywood celebrities, continue to promote the many, and varied, theories surrounding the murder. The attempts at explaining Sirhan’s actions, from ‘mirror-gazing’, ‘amnesiac episodes’ and ‘trance-like states’, as reasons for the assassination have succeeded in obscuring just how explicit the motive of Robert Kennedy’s assassin was.

The answer to the question of motive lies not in conspiratorial intrigue but in the story of how Sirhan’s life developed from an innocent 12-year-old Arab immigrant into a committed and fanatical supporter of the Palestinian cause with virulent anti-American sentiments. The Making of an Assassin takes the reader back to the killer’s early exposure as a schoolboy to the horrors of the Arab-Jewish conflict in East Jerusalem and the experiences of the Sirhan family and their neighbours who were at the centre of the struggle. The author also examines, and questions, accounts by Sirhan’s family that they were forcibly removed from their homeland and also their claims that Israel had ‘stolen’ their home.

The story follows the family as they emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Pasadena, California. It was there that Sirhan, then a student at Pasadena College, Sirhan became integrated with the Arab student community, which, as a group, debated and promoted the Palestinian and wider Arab cause.

Drawing on interviews with Sirhan’s acquaintances, the author reveals how the future assassin’s politics developed from his years as a young teenager to his eventual commitment to violent solutions to the Palestinian cause. This book offers a different and detailed portrait of Sirhan to those provided by conspiracy authors, revealing him as a frustrated, angry, and depressed social misfit who failed at virtually everything he turned his hand to and who was very much interested in a solution to where his life was going by engaging in extremist politics.

Using police and FBI investigative files and obscure material which has never before been examined – including interviews with family members, work colleagues and friends, police reports and LAPD ‘Special Unit Senator’ files – a compelling review of Sirhan’s life is constructed, providing the reader with an in-depth analysis of Sirhan’s state of mind leading up to and following the assassination.