Shadow Play by William Klaber

Author:William Klaber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

TWELVE

Hypnotic Dreams

WHEN DR. BERNARD Diamond arrived from San Francisco, he was not pleased to learn that Dr. Eric Marcus had admitted in court that Sirhan might be lying about his loss of memory. Marcus felt bad about it and apologized, because it was Diamond who had spent time probing this issue.

Emile Berman called Dr. Diamond to the witness stand the following day, and Berman opened by having the doctor recite his academic credentials. Diamond had graduated from the University of California Medical School in 1939. He had served as a psychiatrist in the army in World War II. He had studied at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of Michigan and at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Most noteworthy, since 1964 Dr. Diamond had served on the faculty of the University of California, where he was a full professor in the law school, the medical school, and the school of criminology.

Bernard Diamond was at the very top of his profession. He had served in leadership positions in prestigious psychiatric associations, he had won awards for his achievements in psychiatry and law, and he had served on the California Special Commission on Insanity and Criminal Offenders. The members of the jury might have been impressed by all this, but they weren’t given the opportunity. Berman forgot to ask Diamond about his professional credentials.

“Now, then,” said the attorney, unaware that he had already lost a wheel, “just tell us where your first examination [of Sirhan] was made and what it consisted of and what, if you are ready to state, what views you had at the time of your first examination.”

It was a broad question and Dr. Diamond took advantage. He launched himself into a remarkable monologue that stretched over several days, rarely interrupted by Berman, during which Diamond told the rather extraordinary story of his encounters with Sirhan Sirhan.

Diamond’s initial interview with Sirhan took place on December 23. He described Sirhan at that time as being “superficially cooperative.”

“It seemed to me that he was more than willing to communicate to me that he had shot and killed Senator Kennedy; that he regarded Senator Kennedy as an enemy of his people, the Arab people; and that he committed this assassination because he felt it was necessary to prevent Kennedy from fulfilling a promise that Sirhan had heard, or thought that Kennedy had made over television in the previous month.”

There was one part of Sirhan’s story, however, that Diamond found most peculiar. “I readily observed that he did not describe to me spontaneously either the shooting or the notebook, and I questioned him about these, and he protested to me that he had no memory of the actual shooting and had no memory of the notebook itself.”

Sirhan was able to relate to Diamond the chain of events that brought him to the Ambassador Hotel, but his memory stopped with his having coffee with a pretty girl. His recollections began again with his being choked after the shooting. Sirhan could remember being taken away in the police car and being in a room in the police station with various officers talking to him.

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