In his new book, "The Dark Side of Camelot,"
Seymour M. Hersh, a prize-winning investigative reporter,
attempts to radically revise the history of John F. Kennedy.
Soon after an assassin's bullets cut short the JFK presidency,
books by his former aides and speech writers, notably "A
Thousand Days" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and "Kennedy"
by Theodore Sorenson, painted a glowing picture of the young
president as a heroic and honorable man, dedicated to advancing
the interests of America, aided in this quest by the best
and brightest men and women in the realm and who, in his
finest moment, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, courageously
confronted and faced down the Soviet foe. In the variations
on this theme that followed in the media, including movies,
miniseries and profiles in glossy magazines, the Kennedy
White House became a veritable Camelot on the Potomac.
Hersh sets out to remedy this unfortunate
over-romanticization and help, as he puts it, "the nation
reclaim some of its history." In its place, he substitutes
a far more sinister vision, depicting Kennedy as a sex maniac,
marital cheat, bigamist, speed freak, liar and corrupt politician
who employed in his covert service Mafia chiefs, panderers,
Communist spies and political fixers and engaged in stealing
national elections, shaking down corporations for contributions,
plotting assassinations and, in the very same Cuban missile
crisis, secretly caving in to Soviet conditions. What is such
a radical revision based on? Hersh claims his evidence is
both new and substantiated. But, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson,
much of what can be substantiated in this book is not new,
and much of what is new, including his most sensational findings,
cannot be substantiated.
Hersh is right that the initial books
on Kennedy did omit potentially relevant information concerning
his health problems, personal relationships and the involvement
with covert actions. Much of this information was simply not
available then; the Freedom of Information Act had not yet
been passed. But history did not stop with the publication
of Schlesinger's and Sorenson's biographies in the mid-1960s.
More than 1,000 books about the Kennedy family followed, creating
a mini-industry. And many of these books, especially those
published after the release of the report of the Senate Select
Committee on Assassinations in 1975, contain essentially the
same factual material about the covert side of the Kennedy
administration as is found in Hersh's book. For example, six
of the eight major "secrets" Hersh cites in his opening chapter--Kennedy's
undisclosed health problems, the secret negotiations during
the Cuban missile crisis, the administration's plots to remove
Fidel Castro, h! is extramarital affairs, campaign finance
diversions and the taping system in the White House--can all
be found, often in greater detail, clarity and perspective,
in Richard Reeves' 1993 biography, "President Kennedy: Profile
of Power."
What Hersh adds are his idiosyncratic
interpretations. He assumes Kennedy's actions proceeded not
from conventional political considerations such as winning
elections or advancing his programs but from his personal
vulnerability to blackmail. In the case of the selection of
Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate in 1960, for example,
Hersh assumes JFK's motive was not political expediency, the
most plausible motive since LBJ helped him win the election
by carrying Texas, but that he must have been blackmailed
into the choice. Then Hersh speculates on what dark secret
could possibly lie behind the assumed blackmail. Seeking to
prove this thesis, he is able to give a new interpretation
to the previously established facts.
To be sure, in his aggressive search
for the dark secrets to explain JFK's vulnerability to the
putative blackmail, Hersh did develop new material bearing
on JFK's alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, JFK's alleged
bigamy, JFK's alleged assassination discussions with a Mafia
chief and Robert F. Kennedy's deliberate obstruction of justice
in hiding evidence of some of the above on the day JFK was
assassinated. The problem: its provenance.
In the case of JFK's rumored liaison
with Monroe, Hersh's investigation turned up a secret archive
of correspondence between JFK and an otherwise unknown New
York lawyer that included, among other sensational documents,
a letter from JFK to Monroe acknowledging that they had an
extramarital affair and offering to set up a trust fund for
her mother in exchange for her public silence about it. Just
before publication of "The Dark Side of Camelot," this archive,
which contained a number of obvious anachronisms, such as
ZIP Codes before they existed, was determined by a television
network to be a forgery. To his credit, Hersh excluded that
fraudulent documentation from his book. But without it, the
conclusions he drew about a sexual relationship between JFK
and Monroe had no basis except for unsubstantiated celebrity
rumors. Hersh's other discoveries all involve recovering snatches
of lost memories from distant or defective witnesses, a questionable
technique of reporting that h! e pushes to the limit of credibility.
Consider, for example, Hersh's finding that JFK was a bigamist.
The rumor began circulating in the extreme right-wing press
in 1961 that in 1947, JFK, then a congressman, had secretly
married Durie Malcolm, a Palm Beach socialite. Both JFK and
Malcolm denied the story, and when it persisted, JFK asked
Ben Bradlee, then at Newsweek, to investigate it. Bradlee
determined it was a false story emanating from an error in
a flawed book of genealogy (which even spelled Malcolm's name
incorrectly). Some 35 years later, Hersh resurrected the story,
not on the basis of any witness or document to the alleged
marriage but on the basis of a piece of conversation that
he managed to elicit from a 79-year-old Palm Beach resident,
Charles Spalding. Spalding, who, though interviewed many times
before over 50 years, never before claimed a role, now told
Hersh that he knew about the supposed first marriage because
he had himself eliminated the record of it ! at the Palm Beach
County Courthouse, saying, according to Hersh! , "I went out
there and removed the papers." Presumably, in previous interviews
after JFK's death, he had not remembered this extraordinary
(and criminal) act.
But how reliable is Spalding's new
1997 memory of this incident that supposedly happened in 1947?
Before Hersh interviewed him, Spalding had problems with his
ability to recall routine information, which Hersh generously
describes as an "impairment of his short-term memory." Such
a deficiency notwithstanding, this piece of recovered memory
about JFK stands or falls on a simple test. If the 1947 marriage
registry in Palm Beach County, which was then handwritten
and bound, was marred or missing a page, Spalding's story
could be valid. If on the other hand the registry was intact
and the entries consecutive, Spalding's memory of removing
the papers could not be any more valid than the forged archive
of Monroe letters. As it turned out, Hersh and his investigators
were unable to find any such gap in the marriage records nor,
for that matter, any record of a marriage application, which
had to be made three days before the ceremony. Nevertheless,
on this piece of recovered memory ! from a person who Hersh
knew suffered memory lapses and whose recollection was impeached
by an investigation of the records, he asserts in "The Dark
Side of Camelot," as established fact, that both JFK and his
brother Robert "had lied in their denials to newspapermen
and the public about Jack Kennedy's long-rumored first marriage
to a Palm Beach socialite," that JFK's marriage to Jackie
was not a legal union and that his children were born out
of wedlock.
Hersh's second new finding, that Sam
Giancana, a notorious Chicago Mafia chief, conspired with
JFK to fix elections and arrange the assassination of Castro,
was based on a similar device of eliciting new data from old
witnesses. In 1961, Judith Campbell Exner, a former actress,
"dated" both JFK and Giancana. This extraordinary coincidence
was first publicly revealed in 1975 in a footnote in the Senate
Select Committee on Assassinations report and became a sensational
story. The issue: Did JFK have any connection to Giancana
(other than a relationship with the same woman)? Exner was
interrogated by the staff of the Senate committee and testified
under oath that she had no knowledge of any relationship between
JFK and Giancana. Afterward, she did not remain silent: She
wrote her own book, "My Story," and gave countless interviews
to journalists, often changing elements of her story. (A 1988
interview of her in People magazine by Kitty Kelley, "The
Dark Side of Camelot," adumbr! ated Hersh's title.) Hersh
expanded Exner's story much further: Instead of "not knowing
of any relationship," with Hersh's help Exner remembered that
she had served as a courier between JFK and Giancana, transmitting
messages, documents and cash concerning assassination, corruption
and election fixing and attended a secret meeting between
these men at which such matters were discussed.
Hersh recognizes that Exner is not
a consistent truth-teller: Either she lied under oath to the
Senate about not knowing of any such relationship, in which
case she committed perjury, or she lied to him 20 years later
when she vividly described such a relationship. In the former
case, there is a possible penalty for lying, years of imprisonment;
in the latter case, there is no penalty for lying to a journalist
but a possible profit and extended celebrity. In either case,
her veracity was in question. Nevertheless, Hersh chose to
assume that she had perjured herself (and lied in her own
autobiography and other journalistic accounts) but had been
truthful and reliable with him, and on the basis of her newly
recovered memory, he transmogrified Kennedy into a Mafia co-conspirator.
Hersh's third and most extraordinary
new finding is the cover-up that occupied the mind of Robert
Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general, on Nov. 22, 1963, the
day his brother was killed. Hersh's first chapter, "November
22," is indeed a report of Robert Kennedy's inner thinking.
He asserts, for example, that "Bobby Kennedy understood that
revelation of the material in his brother's White House files
would forever destroy Jack Kennedy's reputation as President"
and that "[a]s Bobby Kennedy knew, President Kennedy and Sam
Giancana shared . . . a stolen election and assassination
plotting" and "Bobby Kennedy knew . . . that Jack Kennedy
had been living a public lie." In this frantic state of mind,
he reports, Robert Kennedy immediately engaged in a frantic
cover-up of these and other dark secrets.
But how, even with his legendary investigative
skills, did Hersh manage to recover these new memories from
Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968? Hersh did not
interview Robert Kennedy before his death, and Hersh does
not list any source for these interior thoughts in his documentation.
Nor could he have gotten it from Kennedy's own writings, since
they don't contain them or even make reference to such matters.
Hersh must have invented these facts.
Such license may serve to expand
the universe of creative journalism, but it unfortunately
does not produce credible history. When the pretensions of
"helping the nation reclaim some of its history" fade away
on scrutiny, this book turns out to be, alas, more about the
deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies
of John F. Kennedy.
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