Washington, United States:
Robert F Kennedy's daughter Kerry described on Saturday the “pain” she felt when seeing photos published by the Trump administration of her father's autopsy after his murder in 1968.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January to declassify the remaining secret files about the murders of President John F Kennedy, his younger brother and former attorney -general Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
After the Friday release, reminded of her father “will be hard in a new and unimaginable way,” Kerry Kennedy posted on X.
“We will not only see him as we remember. Instead, we are confronted with graphic, explicit photos of his mutilated body from a autopsy report,” she added.
It was difficult to be an 8-year-old girl who lost her father to a man with a gun. It was hard to absorb that violence. It was hard to imagine how his last moments were. It was hard to know that when I watched a movie or show about the sixties, I would inevitably relive the worst … pic.twitter.com/75jrciecox
– Kerry Kennedy (@kerrykennedyrfk) April 19, 2025
Trump had said in January that “everything will be revealed” when he ordered the released records, in a clear attempt to clean up conspiracy theories around the murders.
The Republican leader had accepted editors about national security problems in a tranche of archives that he had released during his first term, but later promised the full data.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard had posted on X on Friday that she was “honored … to lead the declassification efforts and to shine a long-awaited light on the truth.”
The 10,000 pages relating to Robert Kennedy, which was released this week, are followed by another 50,000 “in the course of searching for FBI and CIA warehouses,” Gabbard added.
Kennedy's son Robert F Kennedy JR has become close to Trump and now serves as his secretary of health and human services.
The younger Kennedy had questioned the official conclusion that Sirhan Sirhan in Jordan, convicted of the murder in June 1968 of RFK, dismissed the fatal shot and he had printed Trump to release all remaining information.
Sirhan, who was arrested in the hotel where the 42-year-old Kennedy was shot, remains in prison.
Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that a second shooter fired the fatal shot, but a major assessment by the FBI concluded that “the overwhelming evidence underlines the fact that Sirhan Sirhan was the only murderer.”
Kennedy told the Washington Post on Friday that he did not “expect that there would be a smoking gun in all this” to support his theory of CIA involvement in the murder of his father.
He acknowledged the function that “it was a painful choice for me” when Trump asked him if the autopsy photos should be taken.
But “the public interest in full disclosure outweighs the importance of our family,” he said.
Dni Gabbard offered her “Deepest Thank you for Bobby Kennedy and the support of his families” on Friday.
But Kerry Kennedy wrote in her message on X: “I didn't support this.”
She took a wider wipe to the Trump government, under which she said that “countless others suffer even more” than the Kennedys.
Kerry Kennedy mainly pointed to migrants who were deported to El Salvador, federal employees and transgender people who fear their rights.
“The Trump government may think that they can bury us with pain, but we will get up from it, louder and proud than ever,” she wrote.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
