Robert Kennedy’s daughter laments ‘pain’ of autopsy photos

Kerry Kennedy speaks onstage during the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ 2024 Ripple of Hope Gala on December 11, 2024 in New York City. FILE PHOTO/Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter Kerry on Saturday described the “pain” she and her family felt on seeing photos published by the Trump administration of her father’s autopsy after his 1968 assassination.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January to declassify remaining secret files on the 1960s killings of President John F. Kennedy, his younger brother and former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Following the Friday release, remembering her father “will be hard in a new and unimaginable way,” Kerry Kennedy posted to X.

READ: Trump declassifies JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr assassination files

“We won’t just see him as we remember him. Instead, we’ll be confronted with graphic, explicit photos of his mangled body from an autopsy report,” she added.

Trump had said in January that “everything will be revealed” as he ordered the records released, in an apparent bid to clear up conspiracy theories around the assassinations.

The Republican leader had accepted redactions over national security concerns in a tranche of archives he ordered released during his first term, but later promised the full records.

READ: A dump of JFK-related records reveals past CIA secrets

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard had posted Friday, also on X, that she was “honored… to lead the declassification efforts and to shine a long-overdue light on the truth.”

The 10,000 pages relating to Robert Kennedy released this week will be followed by a further 50,000 discovered “in the course of searching FBI and CIA warehouses,” Gabbard added.

Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become close to Trump and is now serving as his secretary of Health and Human Services.

The younger Kennedy had questioned the official conclusion that Jordanian-born Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of RFK’s June 1968 murder, fired the fatal shot, and he had pressed Trump to release all remaining information.

Sirhan, who was apprehended in the hotel where the 42-year-old Kennedy was shot, remains in prison.

Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that a second gunman fired the fatal shot, but a voluminous review by the FBI concluded that “the overwhelming evidence underscores the fact that Sirhan Sirhan was the sole assassin.”

Kennedy told the Washington Post on Friday that he did not “expect there would be a smoking gun in any of this” to back his theory of CIA involvement in his father’s murder.

He acknowledged to the Post that “it was an agonizing choice for me” when Trump asked him whether the autopsy photos should be included.

But “the public interest in full disclosure outweighs our family’s interest,” he said.

DNI Gabbard on Friday offered her “deepest thanks for Bobby Kennedy and his families’ support.”

But Kerry Kennedy, in her post on X, wrote, “I did not support this.”

She took a broader swipe at the Trump administration, under which she said “countless others are suffering even more” than the Kennedys.

Kerry Kennedy pointed especially to migrants deported to El Salvador, laid-off federal workers and transgender people fearing for their rights.

“The Trump administration may think they can bury us with pain, but we will rise from it, louder and fiercer than ever,” she wrote.