Over the years, Seymour Hersh has come to be regarded as a cult figure among investigative reporters. He exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and won the Pultizer Prize for international reporting in 1970. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.” Hersh established his reputation as an indefatigable, relentless journalist.
So it seemed perfect for Hersh to take on one of the most enduring myths of modern American life: John Kennedy’s world of Camelot. It is true that Kennedy had come under some scrutiny for his sexual voraciousness and ruthless ambition. Somehow, however, President Kennedy remained in the American imagination as a virile and charming hero. But Hersh’s Kennedy, depicted in his new book, “The Dark Side of Camelot” (Little, Brown, 498 pages, $26.95) is simply immoral. Among Hersh’s claims and contentions:
– Kennedy stole the 1960 presidential election from Republican Richard Nixon with the help of the Mafia.
– Lyndon Johnson used his knowledge of Kennedy’s sexual indiscretions to blackmail Kennedy into making Johnson his running mate.
– Kennedy and his brother, Robert, the attorney general, made constant demands for Fidel Castro’s death.
– Judith Campbell (now Exner) was one of Kennedy’s lovers and a friend of Sam Giancana’s. In 1962, two sons of the chief of security of General Dynamics Corp. broke into her apartment. Several months later, the defense contractor was awarded a $6.5 billion contract, which Hersh suggests was the result of blackmail.
– Kennedy had a secret, one-day marriage in 1947 to a Palm Beach socialite, and a Kennedy friend claims to have destroyed the record.
Hersh excluded from the book some of the most serious charges–that Kennedy had promised Marilyn Monroe money if she would keep quiet about their affair–when it became clear that the letter explaining this was probably a forgery.
The much-anticipated book has garnered huge media attention, and a debate has broken out between Kennedy loyalists and critics. Time magazine put the book on its cover and tried to have it both ways–“Debunking JFK: Seymour Hersh takes on Camelot, but how believable is his controversial new book?” In The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills, author of “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” wrote: “Is there nothing of use in this book? Practially nothing.”
But Hersh has his defenders. Jacob Weisberg, writing in the on-line publication Slate, contends that the book is better than its critics say it is. He argues: “Much of what’s in it is also 1) new; 2) shocking; 3) well supported; and 4) worth knowing.” Gore Vidal, in The New Yorker, praises Hersh and explains the powerful Kennedy spin machine.
One comes away from this book with the question: So what? If these charges against Kennedy are true, do they matter? Would history have been different? Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor raised that question, and others, with Hersh recently. Hersh brandished an array of documents from his briefcase to support his arguments on the veracity–and significance–of his controversial book. Here are excerpts from that conversation:
Q. I understand that you grew up in Chicago and once described yourself as “a Jewish prince.”
A. We weren’t wealthy, but I never knew I wasn’t wealthy. I played baseball every day, I went to a great public school–Hyde Park High School–and Shakespeare grammar school. I had a twin brother, so I was never without company, older sisters who we would torture and be tortured back. We (had a) standard, first-generation upbringing in America.
Q. Do you see similarities between Chicago and Boston, where the Kennedys ruled?
A. It’s Irish pols–(the idea) that the people don’t need to know what is going on. It’s not noblesse oblige because there was no obligation to the (people).
Q. What do you have to say to Theodore Sorenson, a special counsel to President John Kennedy, who said your book is “a pathetic collection of wild stories”?
A. Oh, what I say to Sorenson is real simple. It’s heretical. I say there’s no more reason for me to believe Ted Sorenson on John F. Kennedy or (biographer) Arthur Schlesinger on John F. Kennedy than H.R. Haldeman on Richard Nixon. People don’t think that way.
Q. What is it that fascinates–obsesses–you so about the Kennedys?
A. First of all, it’s a great story, and I like stories.
I’m a nut about Vietnam. There’s a very important line in a memo from (Kennedy National Security Adviser) Walt Rostow . . . four or five days after the (attempted) Bay of Pigs (invasion of Cuba), and it says, we have lost face and we can regain our honor in Vietnam.
I couldn’t see anything so wrong in holding the men at the top to the highest possible standard. And I don’t know why I have to be singled out with some sort of ax to grind or passion when I’m just saying, let’s hold this darling, beautiful young boy to the highest standard you can hold him to. Why not?
Q. What about the allegations made in Vanity Fair by Robert Sam Anson, who charges that you are a reporter who blackmails sources?
A. He says I’m a horrible human being, money-grubbing, betrayed somebody who worked with me. He didn’t really say much about my reporting.
I’m my own worst victim. I say things. It’s like Tom Powers said in his review (in The New York Times), I make “blood enemies.” It’s not hard to do a bad piece on me. I have a lot of blood enemies. I concede that.
Q. What about the Cuban Missile Crisis? How does your depiction square with the recently released Kennedy-tapes book (“The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis,” edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow)?
A. My account of the missile crisis is not an account of the deliberations. I applaud the people at Harvard who put together the Kennedy tapes (for the book), but I don’t think that is where the real action was. In my view, the real action was in the back channels with Nikita Khrushchev. What they did was resolve the crisis in secret, and they didn’t tell the American people. By the way, the resolution was rational. But they didn’t tell the American people. This guy is dealing with nuclear war and resolving a nuclear crisis, and he isn’t playing straight with us? And people are going to defend him for that or say it’s OK? Wow. I don’t know where you were, but everyone I knew was hiding under desks at school.
Q. There is a lot of sex in this book and . . .
A. You bet. There was a lot of sex in the White House.
Q. Can you explain why it matters?
A. The thing about the sex is mind-blowing for me. Someone in the CIA said to me, “You want to understand Jack Kennedy, talk to the Secret Service guys.” I went to the Secret Service guys. Jackie Kennedy had just died, so they felt free to talk. If they were willing to put it (their charges) on the record, I have to write it.
Q. Why?
A. What’s the point of writing it? It’s in the book. They weren’t allowed to check out the women. They couldn’t check their purses or handbags. They couldn’t check to see whether they had guns or stilettos or tape recorders. It’s the Cold War. The president is at risk. Their job is to take a bullet for him. They didn’t know sometimes until the next morning whether he was alive. What (occurred) was very demoralizing and very unpresidential.
It was all in the open in the White House, except not obviously in front of Jackie. This kind of risk-taking, I think, is relevant, because there was a continuum–between this risk-taking and the recklessness in lying about the missile crisis, in beginning the Vietnam operation, in continuing it.
