Chapter 1

How To "Make a Score" and "Retire"

"I'd like to make a score and get out. Retire."

Seymour M. Hersh, better known as Sy, to Robert Sam Anson, for the November, 1997, Vanity Fair.

"You think I wouldn't sell my mother for My Lai? Gimme a break." More Hersh to Anson.

"I sat down with the two guys and talked to them about the book. I mean, if you want to know the truth, I was also in a terrible position because I wanted more [documents from the file] . . . You know, I wanted that paper. And that's my job . . . If somebody had said to me, "would you buy these? I would have certainly said, 'I'd mortgage my house. I'd sell my wife into white slavery.'"

This is Sy Hersh as quoted by Lloyd Grove in the Washington Post of October 27, 1997.

Those documents, for which he lusted so, turned out to be fakes, as the initial scandals about this Hersh book reported — and scandals do sell books, if they do not help reputations.

"I'm tired of doing books," Hersh also told Anson, "I'm pathological on the subject of Bob Woodward's money. I'm totally envious."

In this honesty, which does not extend to what is really The Dark Side of Sy Hersh, he was referring, Howard Kurtz wrote in the Washington Post of November 11, 1997, to Woodward's "string of best-sellers." Hersh was jealous of the successes of the series of books by and the money they made for one of the Post's two reporters who did most of the Watergate exposing and reporting that got them and the paper widespread fame. But none of Woodward's books was greeted with the criticisms that drew first attention to Hersh's Dark Side, his going ape over fakes that he would have known were fakes if he had done what experienced reporters like him usually do, the necessary checking, instead of lusting for more fakes that were so sensational in their phony content.

Once there was published controversy about his coming book Hersh, the experienced reporter, knew that anything he said could make news and probably would. He was more concerned about getting that attention, which would sell books, than with what he said.

He not only said that he wanted to make enough on this book to retire, he also said the opposite. As Evan Thomas wrote in Newsweek dated November 17 1997:

Hersh had been struggling in recent years to catch up with his old rival, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who has grown rich with a series of "inside" Washington books. (Newsweek is owned by The Washington Post.) Hersh is not in it so much for the money as he is for the glory and the thrill of the big score. "It's just exciting," he says.

No, he's not in it for the money. He was going to retire without money.

On the "thrill" of it.

This serves to introduce us to the Sy Hersh who can and does say anything at any time about anybody and anything that he thinks will do him some good, sell the book or just get the attention that helps sell the book.

With an advance of a million dollars and that just the beginning, of course he was not in it for the money. Just for the "glory" — in seven figures.

Hersh, who was born in Chicago in 1937, had had a spectacularly successful career as an investigative reporter. Of his period, he was one of the most effective, most successful. Despite his sensational record as an investigative reporter, some of his books did not do well. From them he never earned what Woodward's, all of which were successful, earned him. So, that Hersh was jealous of Woodward's financial successes can be understood. However, Hersh, instead of contenting himself with saying he was jealous or envious, described himself as "pathological."

Some of his earlier work was important. It was sensationally important. Much of it produced the kind of information a democratic society requires to be able to function as conceived. It also exposed official wrong-doing, which is essential if those wrongs are to be corrected or ended.

His first major investigative-reporting success was his exposure of the massacre of Vietnamese by United States troops at My Lai. That won him the Pulitzer Prize. He followed that with a successful book version, My Lai 4. In between his books he worked for newspapers and magazines and was on the lecture circuit. He wrote for the Associated Press, The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. As a Washington reporter, he covered the Pentagon for several years. When a lengthy article he had written was reduced enormously, he converted what was not used into an important book, Chemical and Biological Weapons: America's Hidden Arsenal.

Several of his books which were expected to do better and did not were The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House; The Target is Destroyed, which is about the downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007; and The Samson Option, about the alleged Israeli possession of nuclear weapons. (On this, see the Epilogue.)

This last book, The Samson Option, tells us a bit about Hersh that we do not come to in the manuscript as it develops.

He said of his major source for that book, the defected Israeli, Ari Ben-Menashe, after the book was out, that he "lies like some other people breathe," as quoted by Robert Sam Anson in Vanity Fair for November, 1997. Among the other allegations in The Samson Option was that British press baron the late Robert Maxwell was an Israeli agent. After one of Maxwell papers labeled Hersh a liar they sued each other. Anson reports that the suits were settled quietly, with payment to Hersh of a hundred thousand British pounds.

Which should have made a financial success of that book!

But as Anson also reports, money does not last long with Hersh.

Hersh had worked on two Frontline documentaries when their producer suggested that Hersh work on one for the thirtieth JFK assassination anniversary. He turned that down. As Anson wrote, "While Hersh publicly disparaged conspiracy theories — '[if] somebody doesn't write a book for a million dollars than there was no conspiracy'" — the project promised a substantial fee. Hersh, again quoting Anson, "has a friend who could school him in the intricacies of the Kennedy case: Michael Ewing, a researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations whose 1979 report concluded that Kennedy was 'probably' the victim of a conspiracy." Hersh regarded Ewing as "'the heavyweight' of assassination researchers."

Hersh did not get involved in that but in 1993 Ewing proposed a Kennedy book to Hersh. They were to split 50-50 but before too long they split, period.

They had a Little, Brown contract for a million dollars, ten percent of which went to their agent. Hersh had soon spent his half of the first four hundred thousand dollars of their advance. He then got Ewing to agree for him to keep all of the next hundred thousand dollars of the advance. It was over this that they split. Ewing just got out.

But the prospects for the book looked excellent. The Book-of-the Month Club bought the unwritten book for a half million dollars.

In spite of what we have just seen that Hersh said, the truth is that his Dark Side (pun intended) did begin with the JFK assassination. One of several accounts of this is in the October 6, 1997 Newsweek. That article was by Evan Thomas, Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff. Because his was to have been a book on the assassination is the reason , the only reason, Hersh had Ewing as a collaborator. He had no other need for Ewing. In spite of what he says to the contrary.

Hersh did contract a book on the JFK assassination. That is the way it began:

Like many investigative reporters, he has an interest in conspiracy theories, but he is extremely persistent — so much so that his sources sometimes complain he browbeats them. In August 1993 Hersh signed a million-dollar contract with Little, Brown to do a book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The focus of the book shifted, however, when he found Lex Cusack, a New York paralegal who had a cache of truly explosive papers — and, as Hersh would later discover, a severe credibility problem.

But for quite some time these "documents" seemed to guarantee the success of the book.

In this encapsulation there are two observations that equipped Hersh with more heels than Achilles.

It is a wise-guy, unsophisticated fiction that because nobody wrote an assassination book for a million dollars "there was no conspiracy" when the President was assassinated. Along with this Hersh equated fact with theory and "disparaged" those he referred to as conspiracy theorists, as not all are.

Whether or not there had been a conspiracy is not a matter of theory. It is a matter of fact. And what Hersh, who had had no trouble being published with the controversial, did not know is that no major publisher would touch a book that proved a conspiracy, leave alone contract one "for a million dollars."

Ewing was hung up on a Mafia theory of the assassination. There is no proof of this and in the established official fact of the assassination, no reason to suspect it, popular as that theory became.

Hersh has no small mind to be hobgoblined by consistency. Before he and Ewing had their disagreement, Anson reports, that there came a time when Hersh "rushed" to a phone to call Ewing. He boasted, "I've just solved the Kennedy assassination . . . It was Sam Giancana." Or, there was a Mafia conspiracy.

These beliefs, these conclusions Hersh reached, reflect his weakness on the book project into which he threw himself for the next five years.

If Hersh had really checked out these quoted beliefs of his he would have learned that they are all wrong. But he wanted to believe them so they required no real checking. That he believed them was all he needed.

This is a writing technique that Hersh uses throughout. His method is, so to speak, Hersh it.

When he started looking at those Kennedy "documents" about which he had been given a tip, they all looked good to him and their content was very, very exciting. That and the steps taken by those merchandising what turned out to be frauds persuaded Hersh, as his excited words quoted above reflect. Enough of their content will come out as we proceed so there is no point in going into detail now, other than to say that they originated with one Lex Cusack, whose father had been a lawyer in New York and who Lex claimed handled confidential matters for the Kennedys.

Hersh made a deal with his friend Mark Obenhaus, head of the TV production company, Lancer Productions, to make a TV documentary based on the book. ("Lancer" was the Secret Service's code name for President Kennedy.) That was bought by NBC on June, 1996, but after NBC's own independent checking of those "documents" it backed out, giving up the almost a million dollars it had spent. However, then Lancer then sold it to ABC-TV for even more money, for more than two million dollars, according to Dan Barry and Benjamin Weiser in the October 12 New York Times.

Their story also reports that a September 25 ABC News program disclosed that at least some of those supposedly "explosive" documents were fakes. ABC News had hired forensic specialists who reached that conclusion.

But ABC did not cancel that "special." It aired December 4, 1997.

Based on this book, as we see, it just had to be a very special "special."

So far there is the million dollar advance by Little, Brown and the about a million the NBC-TV gave up in dropping the project, plus that more than two million in the ABC-TV Special, and a half a million from Book-of-the Month Club. (That NBC-TV Entertainment show based on the book had an estimated cost of $2.5 million. And then there were the lawsuits filed November 21 and the costs of the federal grand jury inquiry into the fraud that is so clear and despite which lawsuits were filed by those selling fraudulent documents. (This interests us later.)

Hersh also got, according to Little, Brown publisher Sarah Crichton, as quoted in Newsday on October 24, "$50,000 from the outside producer of a planned documentary 'plus a monthly salary for 15 months . . .'"

What that monthly salary was is not reported.

In terms of marketing the book, in addition to the Book-of-the-Month Club half-million dollars to Little, Brown, from which Hersh got his cut, Newsweek of September 8 reported the first hardback printing would be of a half-million copies. In the October 2 story by Long Island's Newsday's expert on books, Paul D. Colford set that figure at three hundred and fifty thousand, still a very large first printing.

Colford also reported that "Little, Brown & Co. trumpets Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot across two pages in its fall catalogue: 'This monumental work — five years in the making — will change our view of the Kennedys forever.'"

And this, before the book was out to confirm it, seems to have been Hersh's objective once he forgot about the assassination. Almost but not quite entirely.

Continuing with what Colford wrote, "The company promised booksellers a $500,000 marketing campaign, a two hour ABC special on the writing of the book to be hosted by Peter Jennings and full-page ads for the hard-cover in leading newspapers." (They were the size of tabloid, not standard newspaper pages.)

The headline on Colford's article is, "Explosive Find Backfires." ABC made use of that in the Peter Jennings plug on the network's 20/20 show in his "report on how the hoax was unmasked by forensic experts retained by the network." These hoaxes included use of a typewriter model "to produce documents [that] was not invented until years after they purportedly had been written."

For most people, use of forensic experts was the obvious means of checking but for subject experts, which Hersh is not, content also serves that purpose, as we see.

However, if one is Hersh with the Hersh concept of the Hersh omniscience (to say nothing of that lust for Woodward-level money) one needs only this Hershian lust.

Liz Smith, the columnist, has done more than her share to publicize and make falsehood appear to be credible with her part of the story to which we come. Here we report what Colford said that she said in her syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times, which owns Newsday:

Lois Smith led her Friday [October 29] column by scoffing "Well, we are not surprised that the Marilyn Monroe/JFK 'payoff' story, which was supposed to be a major part of Seymour Hersh's upcoming book on the Kennedys, seems to have fallen through in a spectacularly embarrassing manner . . . It never made sense on any level."

(Which, as we see, is fair comment on the part of the book that in her own way Smith used in some of her columns that were mostly about Judith Campbell Exner, who is a major figure in the Hersh book.)

Colford also quotes The New York Times column of the same day by Maureen Dowd as saying that Jennings and Hersh "have ears full of cider." She asks, "How on earth do these two geniuses believe for a second that Kennedy would put something like that on paper," the alleged Kennedy buying of Monroe's silence about their alleged relationship for a reported six hundred thousand dollar protection of Monroe's mother.

This and was it in keeping with Monroe's character are obvious questions that should have come to the mind of any responsible intelligent cub just out of journalism school. Which, of course, be-Pulitzered Hersh is not.

Colford has more that we come to in addressing the book itself but his last words, quoted from Hersh himself, are worth bearing in mind: "The bottom line is the book will stand on its own."

As we see, it can't even sit down on its own and the bottom line is that the book is an ax job. Not a mere hatchet job but an ax job — on all Kennedys.

Meanwhile, with all this attention to those "documents" and collectors anxious to have what is unique, a reported hundred and forty people paid between four and five and possibly as much as six million dollars for the "originals" that Hersh had his access to. The Washington Post of October 27, in one of the most informative articles by its Lloyd Grove, in reporting these figures, also says that those sales were helped materially by the publicity for which Hersh was responsible. It was one of his means of persuading those who held the supposed originals to give him access to them.

Grove also reported that Hersh spent two years trying to corroborate the content of what, from that content alone, had to be fakes, by using "research and interviews." What Hersh could learn by "research and interviews" was controlled by who did what to him was research and with what knowledge and who was interviewed and with what background, knowledge and dependability.

Hersh spent two years on what with common sense and consultation with legitimate rather than imagined experts would not have taken a day.

Only then Hersh would not have his seven-figure return from his book, Woodward-style, to calm his "pathology" if not also his greed.

From the content of his book, Hersh used no authentic experts or he just refused to believe them because some of what is clearly fraudulent in some of those supposed JFK "documents" is in the book, without those frauds as his source. What he uses that is not true is essential to his ax-job on JFK so he makes on that it is true when it is not, with the proof that it is not readily available.

Grove also reported that "Hersh decided to sign a deal with NBC's entertainment division rather than its news side because he was worried about interference from the networks journalistic bureaucracy. He said he had an 'image that we couldn't have the freedom we wanted with a network news division .'"

At least they'd have had less checking, less concern for factual accuracy. The standards for news and for entertainment are not the same. What can make entertainment need have no news value, nothing new in it, and those who pass on it do not evaluate it on whether or not it is new or even factual.

According to Ewing, Hersh "said that he believed that NBC is pushing him more strongly for authentication as a result of what he believes is same form of pressure from the Kennedy family."

Of which there is no reflection of even the slightest effort in anything I have seen in a large collection of news accounts mostly from publications that are not pro-Kennedy. It was also denied firmly.

This was one way for Hersh to explain to himself why the NBC vetting process, at the very least, did not authenticate what he was selling it.

When Ewing raised questions about a "document" in which supposedly the President referred to "underworld associates," quoting Anson, Ewing told Hersh, "The story is full of shit." "Replied Hersh, 'The Kennedys will never be able to disprove it.'"

If their association did not end earlier, that kind of Hersh response was more than enough for a responsible man to bring it to an end.

Still on that checking, as Anson also wrote, "losing a major chapter [that Marilyn Monroe fakery in particular] didn't bother him. He had plenty of other disclosures including, he says, 'very serious new stuff on foreign policy . . . things nobody knows.'" Referring to that as "stuff", as we see, is to praise it and it is indeed "things that nobody knows." "Nobody knows" what is not true.

Hersh then gets into one of those "things" that "nobody knows," the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. "'You'll love it,' says Hersh."

We do see what there is to "love," if one thinks as Hersh does.

What Hersh told Ewing, that he could use what was "full of shit" because no Kennedy could disprove it, and that what his book has about the Diem murder that Hersh told Anson he would "love," tell us much about the Hersh who wrote this book and about the book and what he sought to do and prove with it.

No honest and responsible writer uses what is not true merely because he believes nobody will prove it is not true.

What is not true in this book extends to what Hersh says "nobody knows."

Nobody knows it because it is not true. This applies in particular to what is to be "loved", as we see, Hersh's account of the assassination of Diem.

That there is so much in this book that is not true leads to the in some ways remarkable attention to it in the November 17 issue of Time magazine, to the article written by Richard Lacayo and to the commentary by Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley.

Most of the cover of that issue is the face of President Kennedy. On the left, which is on the right cheek and ear of the picture, is "Debunking JFK" and on the right, running from the eyebrows to below the nose is "Seymour Hersh takes on Camelot, but how believable is his controversial new book?"

The Time conclusion, which we amplify herein, is that the Hersh book is not believable.

These stories and many more on which we do not draw represent a great change by the media. For years it had promoted all the anti-Kennedy works, of which there were many, almost entirely uncritically. For whatever reason, this time some of the media did fulfill its essential role of asking questions. Of them we have selected merely a few because those same questions and many more come up as we examine what Hersh did write and publish.

Some articles were favorable to the book and were not critical of its Hersh-it method. Some reviews, by those who lacked knowledge of the material and took Hersh's word without question, were favorable to the book. Anti-Kennedy feeling was quite visible in a few. Gore Vidal was related to Jackie Kennedy. He has a long and consistent hate-Kennedy record. His "Coached by Camelot" review in the December 1, 1997 New Yorker asks, in its subheading, "Why do we still want to defend JFK?" It is effective criticism, blending legitimate criticism with half- truths and misrepresentations. It is the harshest of the ant-Kennedy articles spawned by this anti- Kennedy diatribe of a Hersh book.

The November 3rd The New Yorker and the Vanity Fair articles are longer than Time's but those magazines do use longer articles. (That longer, pre-publication The New Yorker article is by David Samuels. It is on and is titled, "Fakes." It has the subtitle, "Who Forged the J.F.K. — Marilyn Monroe Papers?") Besides Time's giving its story the cover it also gave the story nine full pages, which is extensive attention. It also was fair with the inside title, "Smashing Camelot." That is what Hersh set out to do, what he believed would make him real money, enable him to "retire."

This critical attention is particulary principled by Time because it is part of the giant Time-
Warner conglomerate that also owns the Hersh book's publisher, Little, Brown.

As Time did, this is the way our media is supposed to work, but it is the way our media

rarely works. Time cannot be praised too highly for this reflection of the honesty and the principle with which it addressed the Hersh book — without regard to the damage it did its own corporation by the debunking not of "Camelot" but of its corporate twin's Hersh book. What Time published in its "Nation" section was against the selfish interest of that corporation because it would discourage the sale of the book another part of that massive conglomerate published.

The headline at the beginning of this section is "What's left of the Kennedy myth takes a hit from a big-bucks exposé. But Sy Hersh's tell-all is short on evidence." This criticism is not exaggerated, as we see.

Aside from the time he spent with all those faked "documents" for more of which he said he'd mortgage his home and even sell his wife into whoring, what Hersh did for those five years is collect all the anti-Kennedy stories possible. It is these stories, to which he added only more mythology and overt lies, that make up the Hersh bid to catch up with Woodward and his "big bucks" and to get whatever, for a writer, "retirement" may be.

What Hersh has done, in fact, underscores the undependability of so many of those from whom so much of these anti-Kennedy stories come.

When they contradicted themselves and Hersh knew it, that did nor discourage him. Or persuade him not to use clearly undependable sources — liars.

No big-bucks in that, not for Hersh!

Not for a writer who requires his own lying.

If some of his claimed sources are believed, then their lying is also Hersh's lying because they refer to what he attributes to them as lies.

Time notes that "the books have grown nastier and nastier and dug deeper into J.F.K.'s extramarital affairs." It then states that Hersh's book was to

amplify some of the most radioactive stories of the Kennedy era. It also was to promises to nail down more than it does. . . . If those dirty files exist, Hersh didn't get them. Don't look here either for a nuanced portrait of Kennedy's presidency. This isn't the kind of book that has much to say about the space program or the Alliance for Progress. And if the Kennedy name already has a cloud over it, Hersh's book come to market the same way. Before publication he had to remove what would have been its most titillating assertion — that the President signed a contract agreeing to pay Marilyn Monroe $600,000 in hush money to keep quiet about their alleged (but much, much rumored) affair. Hersh acted after document experts warned him that the "contract" showed signs of being a counterfeit manufactured years after both Monroe and Kennedy died.

Hersh has repudiated the Monroe papers, saying that while he may have been duped at first, what matters is that he realized his mistake in time.

It is not true that "what matters" is that Hersh "realized his mistake" about that Monroe "in time," which he did not, not when he spent some of those two years on it. What "matters" is that an experienced reporter like Hersh could believe that Kennedy would have put his name on such a record so that it could be used to ruin him politically and embarrass him as long as he lived.

It is not at all that Hersh "realized it in time." Little, Brown would not have published that book with that fraud in it after the checking that led NBC-TV to give up the million dollars it had already invested in the Hersh book TV show rather than use that kind of fabrication.

That Monroe fraud is one of the many things Hersh told Ewing no Kennedy could disprove but if he wanted his book to be published it and more like it, all those "documents" he so lusted for so he could get his big-bucks from them, had to come out. They are not in his book.

As Time continues,

Meanwhile, he has been promising that what remains of the book will still rock what remains of the Kennedy legend. The legend survives because it was more than that. Kennedy was a turning point in American life, a President who restarted the nation's psychic engines and successfully brought the U.S. through some of the worst predicaments of the cold war. All the immensities of the later 1960s — Vietnam, the racial transformation of America and the erstwhile youth revolution — were set in motion during his presidency. That same complicated stature makes him a legitimate target for the grinding inquiries of real historians. It also makes him a natural one for the mud balls of less scrupulous commentators.

So which is Hersh? Despite the pre-publication hype, most of his claims have been reported before.

My extensive mail confirms Time on what "remains" being more than a mere legend. I've heard from more than twenty-thousand strangers who have written me about my ten published books. Those letters, from all around the world, reflect a deep and a genuine love and respect for the man and for what he did and was trying to do. It has been so many years since I received a letter saying anything else about him I cannot remember when that was.

What has also been impressive in this great volume of unsolicited letters from strangers is that there was an enormous increase in the percentage of those who tell me their age. At least eighty percent of those who have written me beginning with the thirtieth assassination anniversary have gone out of their way to tell me that they had not been born when he was assassinated or what grade in school they were in.

The love and respect for Kennedy in these many thousands of letters from total strangers who never knew him is truly impressive.

As Time said, it is more than a legend.

There is a vast potential market among the many millions who disliked or hated him and what he stood for. They alone can make a success of the Hersh book and make those big bucks for him. But he has also cut himself off from another and a very large percentage of the potential market for any Kennedy book.

Time then gets to whether Hersh intended to be truthful with several illustrations:

But Hersh is also willing to put testimony, hearsay and speculation into close proximity to one another, then declare that they add up to fact. So Hersh says Joe Kennedy clandestinely poured $2 million into the West Virginia primary that clinched the Democratic nomination for his son. The entire Democratic outlay for the national campaign in 1960 has been estimated at around $10 million. But while Hersh tells a number of stories about money being handed around — all of them interesting, some of them plausible — he never explains how he arrived at that whopping figure. Charles Peters, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, who chaired the Kennedy campaign in West Virginia's Kanawha County, says he was interviewed five times for the book. He says that when he tried to argue that the $2 million figure made no sense, "Hersh just kept yelling, 'Bullshit, bullshit!' He wasn't listening."

As the "what ifs" of one page become the self-evident conclusions of a few pages later, large leaps of judgement — on the 1960 election, Viet Nam and the Bay of Pigs — are made from shaky perches. And while it's true that muckrakers have to find a lot of their informants in the muck, some of Hersh's most sensational claims come from sources who have had trouble with the law or, like Exner, have told different versions of the same stories in the past. He acknowledges those problems in his text but nonetheless doesn't hesitate to put faith in what those people tell him.

Do not look for Peters name in the Hersh index. He was interviewed for it five times but he is not mentioned in it.

Judith Campbell Exner reportedly was one of Kennedy bedmates. We have more on her later, as we do on Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs and much, much more.

Time's summary of what Historian Alan Brinkley wrote is in its headline, in large capital letters "SHODDY WORK." The subhead adds that "Hersh's history is not new and his fresh allegations are poorly sourced."

Brinkley begins saying:

Efforts to expose what Seymour Hersh calls the dark side of Camelot began even before the idea of an American Camelot was born. On the day John F. Kennedy died, the best-selling nonfiction book in the U.S. was, as it had been for several months, Victor Lasky's J.F.K.:The Man and the Myth, a withering attack on the character and competence of the President. The attacks have continued, and escalated, ever since —

Brinkley also states that

Hersh's embarrassing book, which recycles virtually every accusation ever leveled at Kennedy, adds very little of consequence to what we already know, and presents it all with a heavy-handed sensationalism that the contents of the book fail to justify. From the beginning to end Hersh makes dramatic claims ("They have kept their silence — until now"; "Until this book it has not been known . . ."), only to present either modestly amplified versions of familiar stories or inflammatory disclosures for which he has no adequate evidence.

Brinkley is the first historian to read and comment on the book in the public press. We come to a few more of his historian's opinions later. He states that "Reading this book is a depressing experience." He concludes saying that what is most "depressing is to see such shoddy and careless arguments and such self-serving credulity coming from a celebrated investigative reporter."

Brinkley did not exaggerate to make his point more telling. It is true that Harsh was celebrated, justly celebrated, for some of his work. It is also true that his investigative reporting was some of the best.

But it is also true, as we see, that some of this book is praised by being referred to as "shoddy" and as "careless," it is that bad.

It lies and it is dishonest in a number of other ways.

Hersh began with the intent of trashing John Kennedy and ruining his reputation in our history, as the Little, Brown catalogue also makes clear, as quoted above.

That Kennedy was a womanizer was well-known long before Hersh got jealous of Bob Woodward so "pathologically." What Hersh undertakes to add to what was known is untrue and it comes from the most dubious sources. Some have no credibility at all, having destroyed their credibility themselves.

Although Hersh pretends they are one, Kennedy's private and professional lives are not the same. Hersh says, without a shred of proof, that Kennedy's private life adversely influenced his public life and endangered the country. This is not merely "shoddy" and "careless."

It is false, and the record is clear despite Hersh's misrepresentation of it.

The world could have incinerated itself over policies Kennedy inherited and could do nothing about, as Hersh does not mention, and Kennedy avoided that unprecedented disaster for the world.

Which Hersh misrepresents.

Without these and other flaws and other dishonesties Hersh would not have his "big- bucks" book and the retirement that makes possible.

The retirement this book makes overdue.