I have no sympathy for Robert F. Kennedy’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan. He should rot in prison

Spare me any tears for Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom rightly denied Sirhan parole more than 50 years after he was convicted of first-degree murder for killing RFK, pointing out in his written rejection of parole that the “most glaring evidence of Mr. Sirhan’s deficient insight is his shifting narrative about his assassination of Senator Kennedy, and his current refusal to accept responsibility for his crimes.”

Forget any ethereal assertions that there was a “second gunman” who killed Kennedy or that Sirhan was programmed to kill. He did it.

Sirhan was acting of his own deranged volition as an avenger for RFK’s support of the sale of Phantom fighter planes to Israel and in twisted commemoration of the June 5 anniversary of the Six-Day War in 1967.

“RFK must die,” Sirhan scrawled repetitively in his notebook. In a 1989 television interview with the late David Frost, Sirhan, who had immigrated from Jordan, said: ’’My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.’‘

Of Sirhan’s Frost interview, the Associated Press wrote: “Mr. Sirhan said that when ... he killed Mr. Kennedy, who was then the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, ‘’I was not doing it out of personal malice toward the man but out of concern for other people.’ ”

RFK’s daughter, Kerry Kennedy, said the 1968 assassination of her father “was a terrorist attack on our democracy.” It was that and far, far more.

Kennedy’s assassination is not a matter of arcane case law, and Sirhan isn’t just any murderer. Millions of living Americans have sickening, irresolvable feelings about Kennedy’s death.

Let me tell you what it was like then. Let me tell you about waiting all day on June 5, watching the news, and feeling hopeless. Adults were weeping, concerned, frightened.

America had gone through a similar trauma on Nov. 22, 1963, when RFK’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, died at the hands of another madman.

I remember the photos in magazines of the wet pantry floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the blood of RFK in a campaign hat. I remember Kennedy’s blank stare as he was comforted by a busboy and the anguished expression of a frantic Ethel Kennedy as she crouched next to him, surrounded by chaos.

Let me tell you about the haunting screams of a Mutual Broadcasting System radio newsman, played over and over: “Get the gun! Get the gun!”

People my age will never forget that. I can still hear it; millions of people can.

Let me tell you about the Kennedy funeral train from New York to Washington, D.C. Millions of people on the Eastern Seaboard lined the tracks for hundreds of miles as Kennedy’s orphaned children stared out the windows, the crowds surging onto the tracks.

Two people died in New Jersey watching that train. Their blood, too, is on Sirhan’s hands. One of my best friends saw the train pass in Pennsylvania as a 10-year-old, and he still struggles recounting it.

As a 7-year-old, I saw the burial in person at Arlington National Cemetery on June 8. Thousands of mourners streamed through the gates, trying to get a glimpse of yet another profoundly dreadful moment of the 1960s.

The hearse carrying Kennedy’s casket passed right in front of me. The flag on the coffin was hyper-illuminated by flashbulbs and TV lights. People wept as the car passed.

Decades later, I met RFK’s widow, who has publicly asked for Sirhan to be spared the death penalty but not to be paroled. Should we consider her wishes — the wishes of a woman who had to raise 11 fatherless children?

I was particularly struck by how tiny Ethel Kennedy was, and, when I saw her, I immediately remembered my late mom saying, “That poor woman, that poor woman,” to our black-and-white television set in 1968.

Let me tell you about how heavy the humidity was at Arlington, and the sad stillness of the air, and the emotional woman standing next to us who said she didn’t care that we had just seen President Lyndon Johnson drive by.

“I don’t give a damn about LBJ. I just want to see Bobby.”

She couldn’t see Bobby because Sirhan Sirhan shot him in cold blood.

Parole? Let me tell you one more thing: Sirhan got lucky. Thanks to the California Supreme Court, which struck down the death penalty, he got to live.