Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was denied parole yesterday, nearly 37 years after a California jury convicted him of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy and sentenced him to death in the gas chamber. At the time, not quite five years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Bobby’s death was considered another instance of the Curse of the Kennedys. But it was much more than that: Sirhan’s assassination of RFK was also the first salvo in the Terror War.

Consider the facts. A young Palestinian immigrant, 24 years old, carried a .22 caliber pistol into the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, lurked in the kitchen behind the ballroom and, when RFK passed through on his way to meet the press after his victory in the California Democratic primary, shot the presidential candidate in the head. (Several others were wounded as well, some of them seriously.) Kennedy died the next day, June 6, 1968. He was 42 years old.

At first the suspect, grabbed in the melee, refused to give his name. He carried no identification. What he did carry was a newspaper clipping about Kennedy’s strongly pro-Israel stance. When authorities finally identified Sirhan as a Jerusalem-born Christian Arab and raided his family’s residence in Pasadena, they found a wealthy of scribblings in his hand, including: “RFK must die.”

And the truth came out. Sirhan was angry about his family’s fate, angry about what he considered his second-class status in America, angry about RFK’s support for Israel, and saw killing Kennedy as his revenge. In the words of one of the investigators: “He decided that Bobby Kennedy was no good because he was helping the Jews. And he was going to kill him.”

Although some have tried, there’s no reason to doubt Sirhan’s guilt. His lawyers first offered a guilty plea if the state would forgo execution, which Judge Herbert V. Walker rejected; he didn’t want any lingering conspiracy theories to mar the legitimacy of the verdict. Then they tried the insanity defense, which Sirhan rejected, threatening to fire them and plead guilty. The jury convicted him on April 17, 1969, after just three days of deliberations. Sirhan went to jail (his sentence was later commuted to life in prison). And the floodgates opened:

Airplane hijackings in 1969, airplane bombings the following year. Ben Gurion Airport in Israel attacked in 1972, 26 dead. The Munich Massacre later that same year. In 1973 the American ambassador in Khartoum was taken hostage and murdered. In 1975 Arab terrorists attacked Orly Airport in Paris, taking 10 hostages; the French obligingly gave them a plane to fly them to Baghdad. In the fall of 1979, Iranian “students” seized the American Embassy in Tehran and held them for 444 days. The truck bombs in Lebanon that killed 241 Marines in the fall of 1983. The Achille Lauro in 1985, when wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer was murdered and tossed overboard. In 1993 a Pakistani gunman opened fire with an AK-47 outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

It’s a grim list, and it goes on and on, culminating in the attack of September 11, 2001. It’s not over, and there’s no end in sight. But it’s useful to remember when it began.