New clue on that RFK photo from '68

Last March, you might remember, journalist Chip Jacobs posted never-seen photos that his brother Paul remembers taking on June 4, 1968, hours before presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy insider Paul Schrade, who also was shot that night, disputed the timing for a few reasons, including the lack of any historical record placing RFK outside downtown's Biltmore Hotel, where Paul Jacobs recalls clicking the photos. So now, Chip writes that close examination of the photos shows a facial blemish that there is historical record for — it could be the make-up covered scrape that Kennedy incurred that day while saving his son David from the undertow at the beach in Malibu. Chip posts:

Get a magnifying glass out. When you do, you’ll see the narrow, mishapen, maybe inch-long mark that RFK had evidently just sustained from rescuing his son against the ocean’s hard bottom. I have searched through pre-June pictures of him and never saw the blemish before. If that scar was fresh, that means my brother’s photographs really were taken when he believed they were: hours before Sirhan Sirhan assassinated the man who might’ve ended Vietnam, healed the nation’s cultural wounds and avoided Watergate.

Some earlier RFK photos do show a freckle or some other skin blemish in the area, but the one in Jacobs' photo does appear to be longer.

Photo: Paul Jacobs