Chapter 5

Hersh's "Professional Reputation in Tatters"

In a sense Hersh structured his book like a news story only it is more like what is appropriate for the supermarket tabloids than for any responsible newspaper.

His opening chapter is like the lead on a news story. It summarizes the story and excites interest in it. He promotes the book the book as new exposé but there is little new in it other than perhaps a few unessential details. What is new in it is nor true. At least some of what is not true was simply made up by Hersh. That is a part of his Hersh-it method.

He pretends to be a historian and is severely critical of Kennedy as President but again, that is what he made up to make money from it. It is not the actuality.

Time, quoted earlier, and Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley summed it up pretty well. The headline Time put on the Alan Brinkley article is "One Historian's View: SHODDY WORK." The subheading says that "Hersh's history is not new, and his fresh allegations are poorly sourced." Brinkley refers to the book as "Hersh's embarrassing book, which recycles virtually accusation ever leveled at Kennedy, adds very little of consequence to what we know and presents it all with a heavy-handed sensationalism that the contents of the book fail to justify. From the beginning Hersh makes dramatic claims . . . for which he has no adequate evidence."

The reason for Hersh's wise-guy response when confronted with this, as we saw, "Who's this guy?" is that there is no other kind of reply he could make. What Brinkley said is, as Hersh knew, true.

Hersh knew what he was doing. He did what he intended to do, sensationalized what was well known.

The Time article says pretty much the same thing. It describes the book as "a big if" and then says it "amplifies some of the most radioactive stories of the Kennedy era. It also promises to nail down more than it does. Even the eyebrow raising first chapter is a tease. If those dirty files exist, Hersh didn't go after them." It also says that "most of his claims have been reported before" (page 42).

Another and basic Time criticism of Hersh and his book is that he "is also willing to put testimony, hearsay and speculation into close proximity to one another, then declare that they add up to fact" (page 44). Add to this more than merely valid criticism that Hersh also just makes up what he presents as fact.

In the New York Times of two days after the book went on sale, the November 13 issue, the also respected historian Richard Bernstein was critical of Hersh and of his writing both in general and in addressing specifics. He referred to the Hersh effort to "trash" Kennedy as "savage," and said that when the book is "closely examined" it "is far less persuasive than it appears at first glance" and "Indeed, in some respects is downright deceitful."

With regard to Hersh as a historian, Bernstein wrote, "The serious problem is that at least some of Hersh's allegations deceive from a technique in the writing of history that calls for a powerful sense of skepticism and mistrust." He refers to one element of what he have referred to as the Hersh-it technique in writing that "Hersh stitches together skeins of circumstantial evidence with suggestive ambiguous quotations, then he ignores contrary evidence in order to reach that darkest conclusion that the material appears to allow." Bernstein follows with an illustration we come to, the Hersh claim that Lyndon Johnson got to be Kennedy's vice-presidential candidate by blackmail.

I've seen no record of Hersh being asked about the comments of this historian, but if he attempted any response it could not be much more than his wise-guy crack about the also respected Brinkley, "Who's that guy?"

This first chapter, as we have been seeing, is something less than "radioactive." As we assume examination of it we come to the "deceitful"almost immediately and we do see total fabrication of what Hersh just made up, as even the National Enquirer would not have. Hersh has been writing about what he says was in those "dirty files," as Time referred to the Hersh writing, that Hersh had no way of knowing existed and that "Hersh didn't go after," as he could have under FOIA. These are the files that Hersh really had no way of knowing were of any special concern to Robert Kennedy if they existed and if Robert even knew of any of them that did exist in the executive offices. (If the reader remembers after several hundred pages, on page 201, in a note, Hersh does acknowledge that the Eisenhower administration, even with "national security," files left virtually none for the incoming Kennedy administration.) That Robert Kennedy had such knowledge, Hersh makes no effort to show.

Hersh is writing about what he refers to as the stealing of the election and financial corruption in it. As another of those total fabrications of the Hersh-it technique, Hersh gets into this with what he have seen is a lie.

As Bobby Kennedy knew, President Kennedy and Sam Giancana shared not only a stolen election and assassination plotting; they also shared a close relationship with a glamorous Los Angeles divorceé and freelance artist named Judith Campbell Exner (page 4).

The President and Giancana both had sex with that woman according to her contradictory stories but the rest of this is Hersh's fiction, made up by Hersh, as we do get into. That the President knew about that CIA/Mafia plot to assassinate Castro, as we have seen, is a Hersh lie. He continues with:

There was further evidence of financial corruption in Kennedy's personal files. As the president's 1964 reelection campaign neared, Kennedy was put on notice by newspaperman Charles Bartlett, his good friend, that campaign contributions were sticking to the hands of some of his political operatives. "No books are kept," Bartlett wrote the president in July 1963, "Everything is cash, and the potential for a rich harvest is clear . . . I am fearful that unless you put a personal priority on learning more about what is going on, the thing may slip suddenly beyond your control."

Robert Kennedy understood, from his own investigations, that there was independent evidence for the Bartlett allegations, one of the attorney general's political confidants had assembled affidavits showing that money for JFK's reelection campaign was being diverted for personal use. The Bartlett letters could not be left for Lyndon Johnson (page 5).

Neither here nor later in the book does Hersh provide any proof of "further corruption in Kennedy's personal files." His case of corruption in the Illinois election, the other "corruption" referred to in what is quoted above, is really no case at all.

There likewise is no evidence, not even a valid reason to suspect, that with all that he had to do Robert Kennedy made his own "investigation," which Hersh here states he did. Nor is there any legitimate reason to suspect that, with all he had to do, he had anyone else make any such investigation for him.

There was no need, other than the need Hersh had in his "savagery."

(And of course, as is true throughout, Hersh has no source note to establish that there was the Robert Kennedy investigation he refers to.)

That line, "The Bartlett letters could not be left for Lyndon Johnson," is just plain dirtiness on Hersh's part. He saw a chance to sling mud so he did. He is, the word Bernstein used, "deceitful" in his whole fabrication about Robert Kennedy dropping all else soon as he heard his brother had been assassinated and allegedly ordered the files purged. Not only did Robert not have time for that, but that each president takes his personal papers with him is standard practice and has been throughout all our history. As we saw earlier, the only difference with Kennedy's papers, deceit on the part of ever-deceitful Hersh again, was that he did not have the time of the interregnum to have his papers gathered and saved where they would be kept until — and this also Hersh did not tell his trusting readers — they went into the Kennedy Presidential Library and under the control of The National Archives — the federal government — because available.

There was no need for, no legitimate use for, Hersh's intendedly dirty sentence. It is part of Hersh's savagery, the historian's, Bernstein's, word.

All Hersh tells us about Bartlett is that he was the President's friend. We examine what another reporter said of Bartlett with what Time said about Hersh's "putting testimony, hearsay and speculation into close proximity to one another and then declare that they add up to fact" in mind. Also historian Bernstein's statement that "the writing of history calls for a powerful sense of skepticism and mistrust."

Bartlett is a major source for Hersh. He has Bartlett on twenty-one pages and in the index there are four subdivisions under Bartlett (page 477). Toward the end of the book Bartlett is Hersh's source in charging that Kenneth O'Donnell, who loved the President dearly, was involved in this alleged financial corruption. Nobody who knew O'Donnell and his relationship with the President made any such allegation of which I am aware, ever. (O'Donnell had been on the President's staff throughout the President's political career. Had he not been dead Hersh would never have dared make any such statement.)

One of the experienced and long-time Washington correspondents of The Boston Globe, Thomas Oliphant, was outraged by the Hersh revisionism. His Op-Ed page article of November 18 was under the headline, "HERSH SLIPSHOD BOOK ON JFK MISSES THE TRUTH BY A MILE":

Like some journalistic Gary Hart, Seymour Hersh keeps egging the rest of the world on to follow him up, to check him out.

And, sure enough, people who probe his "revelations" in "The Dark Side of Camelot" encounter helium instead of a solid foundation of hard evidence.

The veneer of this cartoon of a retouched picture of John F. Kennedy is claimed to be on-the-record, corroborated information. The reality is bullbleep.

The episode that caught my eye — mostly because I was acquainted with the purported principals — is a blood libel directed at the late Kenneth O'Donnell, an original Irish Mafia aide from Massachusetts who was a quasi-chief of staff in the White House and was as close as you got to JFK outside family.

If you read Hersh's hideously written tome, you will get the impression at first blush that O'Donnell was a crook. But if you read more closely, you'll discover — as you will throughout the book — that the "information" Hersh provides doesn't come within a country mile of the charge.

At a minimum, this example displays Hersh's technique in action. He writes that in the summer of 1963, Kennedy "was confronted with a serious allegation" that concerned the skimming of campaign contributions by O'Donnell and two others."

The two others are not identified, and neither are any of the money people. But Hersh's breathless prose is undercut by material published by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in his encyclopedic "Robert Kennedy And His Times." This account 20 years ago of the same general topic, based on what the late attorney general had been told about, referred to evidence that officials at the Democratic National Committee below chairman John Bailey's level "were misusing their party positions."

Hersh's named source is third-hand — Charles Bartlett, a newspaperman whose work is less memorable than his friendship to JFK. In particular, Hersh quotes from a copy of a letter Bartlett told him was sent to the president that July, warning that "an aura of scandal is building up."

Even this letter does not allege what Hersh's own words do, a constant problem in the book. It is at most interpretive, claiming that at best O'Donnell's operations were playing politics in a way "that is breeding resentment and suspicion" and that "at worst they are the heart of an extensive corruption."

Hersh cites no evidence of a presidential response, or even an acknowledgment, which makes his contention that JFK "was confronted" with anything at most argumentative.

Worse, Bartlett's source turns out to be a man (dead since 1990) named Paul Corbin — at which point multiple alarms should have sounded.

The clearest clue to suspicious work is the dressing of sources in fancy clothing they never wore. In the book, Corbin is a "professional politician," a "hardworking campaigner" from 1960 who was close to Robert Kennedy, and was in the Marines in World War II. He might have been "conspiratorial and full of swagger" but also was a "fiercely independent whistle-blower," a "Galahad among the political hacks."

In fact Corbin was a classic little guy in politics — a little o' this, a little o' that, mostly organizing at the county level and the odd job.

Corbin came out of Canada to Wisconsin, began on the very, very far left, gravitated to the late Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red-baiting, then to the Kennedys, and ended up on the fringes of Ronald Reagan's world. While I found him exasperatingly amusing, I wouldn't take his word that the sun was shining.

Robert Kennedy, in the words of his close aide, John Reilly, kept him around like a pet snake. In impact, Corbin on his most influential day was a junior varsity Falstaff wannabe.

Hersh quotes Bartlett quoting Corbin (hearsay at its worst, without one shred of corroboration) that Corbin told Bartlett he took his "evidence" to Robert Kennedy in late November. The attorney general, they said, called the White House, learning that the president had just left for Dallas. That's it.

The real Corbin pulled these stunts all the time on people with more stature and influence than he could ever dream of. This one "sold jobs," that one "conspired with opponents," another one "was gay."

He was tolerated for his loyalty, and his capers were legendary. In my favorite, from the 1960 Wisconsin primary, he imported devoted Kennedy-ite Helen Keyes, a devout Catholic, and paraded her around the state as a "Baptist from Boston" who could vouch for JFK.

Hersh's punishment for his slipshod work will be the dustbin.

The real Kenny O'Donnell was as good as politics and people get.

As the experienced Washington correspondent of the major Kennedy home-town newspaper, Oliphant knew al the people involved an was well informed in general, including as we have seen, about people involved in what Hersh attributes to Bartlett.

This kind of writing, which is typical of the book, slips up on the blind side of the trusting reader. It also is what no self-respecting newspaper would consider publishing. Yet Little, Brown went for it big and Hersh is able to perpetuate his nonstop "savagery" in his immune maligning of the dead, which includes O'Donnell with both Kennedys.

This penetrating Oliphant criticism of the writing, of the content of this book, is even more serious criticism of an experienced reporter, which Hersh is, because Hersh knew that no decent newspaper would publish it and because it is libel-proof, those libeled being, from the Hersh perspective, safely dead.

Newsweek for November 17 was blunt about Corbin as a source, which also means about Hersh using Corbin as a source:

As Hersh notes, Corbin was a colorful figure, " conspiratorial and full of swagger." But what Hersh fails to tell the reader is that Corbin, a Democratic National Committee aid who worshiped the Kennedys, was also a pathological liar who was out to ruin Kenny O'Donnell any way he could (O'Donnell frequently tried to get Corbin ejected from the Kennedy circle). During his reporting, Hersh was repeatedly warned by Kennedy alumni that Corbin was a con man with an anti-O'Donnell ax to grind. Jerry Bruno, a Kennedy advance man, says that Hersh replied, "It doesn't matter if any of this is true. It's a story that needs to be told." Hersh responded to Newsweek: "That's preposterous. I was on notice that Corbin needed to be checked out, but he wasn't lying about this."

There is no reflection in the book that Hersh checked Corbin out or had any confirming source. Certainly none is cited.

Continuing with this basic slander that what Robert Kennedy allegedly had removed were allegedly dirty records the Kennedys had to hide, continuing with his knowingly false representation that the removal of a president's personal papers is some kind of dirty trick rather than the accepted practice of all presidents, and still without any reflection of any knowledge of any means of his having any way of knowing what was in any Kennedy files allegedly removed from the White House, Hersh makes up

Yet another group of documents that had to be removed dealt with Jack Kennedy's health. Kennedy had lied about his health throughout his political career, repeatedly denying that he suffered from Addison's disease. But as Kennedy and his doctors knew, the Addison's, which affects the body's ability to fight infection, was being effectively controlled — and had been since the late 1940s — by cortisone. Far more politically damaging was the fact that the slain president had suffered from venereal disease for more than thirty years, having repeatedly been treated with high doses of antibiotics and repeatedly reinfected because of his continual sexual activity. Those records would be hidden from public view for the next thirty years. There is no evidence he told any of his many partners (page 5).

That Kennedy had Addison's disease is not new. It was alleged by the Johnson forces at the Los Angeles convention and it was proven to be true by my friend, the late Dr. John Nichols, of the University of Kansas Medical School. That his having this disease had no influence at all on his Presidency is obvious from the public record. He was in excellent physical condition, as the autopsy also reflects, and there was no time during his Presidency when the incredible hours that job imposes were too much for him. Nor was the great tensions that are the part of the job, particularly those of the cold war and most of all of the unprecedented Cuba missile crisis.

If Kennedy was the first or only president to have a venereal disease, that would be a surprise, as it also is a surprise that reporting it is an important part of that history. Rather is it Hersh and his "savagery" to have a sensational book that will be his "score" and his retirement.

The business of it being secret until this book, which is what Hersh is really saying at the end of what is quoted is typical of the dishonesty of the writing. And of Hersh's pretense that what he writes, slanders and all, is new.

David J. Garrow, also a Pulitzer winner for his Bearing The Cross, his book on Martin Luther King, Jr., exposed the dishonesty of this Hersh representation in the review of Hersh's book Garrow wrote for the November 17 Newsday: The headlines added by the Newsday editors are consistent with the Garrow criticism and with most of the responsible criticism by responsible critics. The main headline is Double Dirt, in heavy, black type about three-quarters of an inch high,. The subhead is, "Seymour Hersh stains himself with JFK mud." Beginning with the second paragraph:

A 23-year bout with venereal disease is only one of the many charming and tasteful allegations that clutter Seymour M. Hersh's new "investigative" biography of Kennedy, "The Dark Side of Camelot." The venereal disease story, however, also exemplifies the deep problems and stark shortcomings that constantly mar Hersh's book. Number one, the story's not all that new: two previous Kennedy biographies cited the exact same underlying evidence from Kennedy's medical records years ago.

Number two, Hersh then jumps to the most dramatic possible conclusion — labeling Kennedy "an obvious risk to his wife, and to his other sexual partners" — based upon a far from convincing interpretive leap. Hersh gives copies of some incomplete handwritten notes" made by one Kennedy doctor in 1961 — and publicly available at the Kennedy Library in Boston — to an M.D. who holds an administrative post in a Washington interest group. This physician is not identified as any specialist on sexually transmitted diseases, but Hersh nonetheless blithely trumpets the doctor's opinion that Kennedy "clearly was suffering from a sexually transmitted bacterial disease called nongonorrheal urethritis" or, in women, chlamydia. In case a reader's uncertain just how much to make of this, Hersh adds that "By 1997, untreated chlamydia was believed to be the cause of 35 percent of infertility among American women."

The implication, of course, is that Kennedy himself injured women in just this way, but Hersh never expressly addresses the awful insinuation he's just made. Did Kennedy so harm any women? Maybe or maybe not but that imputation is several hops, skips and jumps away from the incomplete doctor's notes about Kennedy "prostate tenderness" with which Hersh started. I wouldn't rely on Seymour Hersh for any of this, or, after reading this book, for much of anything else.

Before the copy of this review, sent to me by my friend Scott Wilson, reached me, and knowing that Kennedy was a womanizer, as Hersh states with greater emphasis, I could only wonder that not one of those women, not one of their husbands, not his own wife, ever had anything to say about Kennedy giving them a venereal disease of any kind.

Hersh's claimed quotation of the doctor is that Kennedy had "nongonorrheal urethritis." And on this only, as Garrow quotes Hersh. However, there is more in the book (pages 230-3).

The second part of what Hersh writes about this is also not easy to believe, that Kennedy had a venereal disease that could not be cured. He died with it, Hersh says despite all the treatments he had over so many years from so many doctors and in so many hospitals. This being true, how can it be that along with all the warnings, no caution, no word from any government or private agency concerned about the transmission of such diseases, especially the federal agency that issues such warnings?

If any of Kennedy's sex partners had sex with men other than their husbands, or if their husbands had sex with other women, from this Hersh version Kennedy was a one-man epidemic of venereal disease, directly and indirectly infecting dozens if not hundreds more people.

The first part, Hersh-like, is based on a lie. He writes:

Kennedy suffered much of his adult life from nongonorrheal urethritis, a painful venereal infection; despite repeated treatment, he went to his death with it. The navy pathologists who conducted the Kennedy autopsy on the night of November 22 found evidence of chlamydia, a high-ranking military officer told me in an interview for this book. Those autopsy notes were not published, the officer added, at the request of the Kennedy family (page 230).

If there is "a high-ranking military officer" who told Hersh "in an interview for this book," Hersh, still again puffing himself and his book up, that this disease showed up in the "autopsy notes" that"were not published . . . at the request of the Kennedy family" he is a liar! More than a simple liar — a compound liar. He lied in saying that the disease showed up on the autopsy and was in the autopsy notes and that they were "not published at the request of the Kennedy family." It has been blamed for everything and anything, so Hersh got in that line with all the Kennedys who could have had knowledge dead.

I can qualify as an expert on the medical evidence in the JFK assassination. I have written about it more extensively than anyone else and after more than thirty years I have yet to get a letter or a phone call from any of those of whom I wrote critically complaining that I had been unfair or inaccurate in any of my criticism — criticisms now public in ten books aside from quotation of them by others.

There was no laboratory work done during the autopsy. Those notes were made by three different pathologists, not the one not named by Hersh, by then Commanders James J. Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, both Navy hospital pathologists, and Colonel Pierre Finck, Chief of the Army Wounds Ballistics Branch, stationed at nearby Walter Reed Army Hospital.

In my Post Mortem, which I published in 1975, I refer to the alleged burning of those notes. I made quite a point of it. While I had much more to say about those autopsy notes, the alleged burning of them alone is on pages 37-8, 103, 134, 144-5, 160, 253-4, 261, 268, 524, and 559.

What Humes actually burned was not his notes but the first draft of his autopsy report. His Warren Commission testimony (2H373) that is reported in Post Mortem (pages 144 and 254 in particular) is that he held his notes in his hand when he testified on March 16, 1964, and that they are part of Commission Exhibit (CE) 397. The man who was then assistant counsel, Arlen Specter, who did the questioning, had the record show that in the Commission records they are in Commission Document (CD) 371. However, they are not in CE 397 as published by the Commission, I checked the Commission's files at the Archives and those notes are not in the file copies of CE 397 or CD 371. But from his testimony it is explicit, Humes did not burn them, he burned the draft of that autopsy protocol, and he held his notes in his hand when he testified. It was years later, when he testified before the House assassins committee, that Humes changed his story and testified that what he burned was his notes. And, when interviewed for the series of articles in the 1972 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Humes said that there was the President's blood on them and he did not want that misused. He could not, obviously, have held them in his hands when he testified months later, in March 1964, if he burned as soon as he wrote the autopsy report in longhand on November 24, 1963.

Without a laboratory examination it is not possible to identify the urethral discharge that can be visible. This same discharge can be other than a venereal disease, and it can be symptomatic of gonorrhea. That is why a laboratory examination is necessary. The autopsy records do not reflect the taking of any sample or for that matter, the making of any observation of any discharge.

In some forms it is known as a "non-specific" infection. That is not sexually transmitted. I had it twice, and it was not sexually contracted.

The second time was in 1943 and it has not returned in the fifty-four years since then — and I was given no medication for it.

I was a military policeman stationed in Trenton, New Jersey, and awaiting orders to go overseas. I did not know it then but we were about to land in Sicily. When I noticed the discharge I reported it and was scratched from that shipment on the assumption it was gonorrhea. I knew there was no basis for that belief so I asked and got permission to go to nearby Fort Fix, where there was a large army hospital. I sat in the office of the Officer of the Day until he returned. He was surprised to see me there. When I told him the reasons he got up and saluted me! He said he saw only those who did not want to go overseas, not those who wanted to go where the war was after being taken off shipping lists.

He was satisfied, and I now do not recall all the details, that I did not have gonorrhea, and he gave me a note to my commanding officer telling him that until the time for shipping came I should spend nights with my wife.

Sexual activity was the treatment for that form of "non-specific gonorrhea urethritis."

Hersh did win, did earn a Pulitzer for his reporting, for his reporting, yet here he writes what would not be accepted by a cub reporter.

Without a laboratory examination, identification of the cause or the discharge is impossible. There was none at the autopsy. In addition, in the authorization for the autopsy, which was signed by Robert Kennedy rather than the widow, and which I printed in facsimile on page 507 of Post Mortem, Robert Kennedy waived the right to withhold anything at all. There are no reservations in it, period. Which is all that a wide assortment of literary whores needed to say the exact opposite and to blame the family for any and all withholdings, for all that went wrong in the botched autopsy, and for all that was not done in it that should have been done.

Whether there was such a "high ranking military officer" and whether he was in a position to know what he was talking about or whether this was an attractive way of Hersh saying what he wanted to say — (and he does lie in this book, so suggesting that he could be lying in this is not so news) — we have no way of knowing. But there is enough public information about the autopsy and the examinations made in it to state that what Hersh says is not possible, whether or not he had a source for what he said.

No-source Hersh that he is throughout the book because he has no source notes when they are vital to the acceptability of any such book.

I have another way of having doubts about this Hersh writing.

That Kennedy had women friends other than his wife has not been secret for many years. Thirty years ago I was the guest of an attractive, pleasant wealthy woman who had been one of his lady friends. I was her guest for much of a week. She spoke about him freely and without inhibition. She had no such complaint about him. She had not seen him since about the time he received the nomination. She also had two young children, which indicates that her fertility had not been interfered with, as Hersh says was common.

Of all the women, including those to whom Hersh spoke and particularly the one who is so important to his book, Judith Campbell Exner, he does not mention one who complains about having been given a venereal disease by the President. Nor does he cite a record left by anyone of them in which she claims she was given a venereal disease by the President. It does seem unlikely that not one had or made or left any such complaint or that all husbands were or would have been totally silent about being infected.

With the life he led, Kennedy's having contracted such a disease would not be unusual. What is unusual is Hersh's writing about it and what he says and does not say about it.

The Newsday headline writer had it right, Double Dirt.

Having made so much up, twisted and distorted and misrepresented so much, Hersh has no trouble reading minds — from the grave. Thus he writes this absolute nonsense:

The family's main antagonist was J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who knew and was eager to take advantage — so the family was convinced — of the darkest Kennedy secrets, including the fact of Jack's marriage to Durie Malcolm. Hoover's biographers have told in compelling detail of Hoover's ability to collect damaging political and personal information about the men in the White House and use it as a weapon. The relentless FBI director had been keeping score on the Kennedys, father and sons, since the early 1940s (page 6).

As we saw earlier, the FBI's investigation, other than what Hersh makes up, showed that Kennedy and Malcolm were not married at Palm Beach.

As an experienced Washington reporter, Hersh knew very well that if Hoover wanted to say a word about any Kennedy — or anybody else — he had a system for leaking what he wanted out and used. Kennedy, of course, also knew that. It is based on this that Hersh gets another of his baseless dirty crack in, "So Hoover's reappointment as FBI Director was Jack Kennedy's first announcement as President-elect" (page 6).

The election was in early November. Kennedy began to announce his appointment just before his inauguration. It was during that winter's heaviest snow and some of the coldest weather Washington had had in years. He did not delay until then making any announcement of any kind, which is what Hersh says. The fact is that when he began making those appointment announcements, from his Georgetown home just before he was sworn in, Kennedy first announced the reappointment of both Hoover and of Allen Dulles to head the CIA, both announced at the same time.

No-source Hersh continues his mind-reading along with his fabrications:

By late afternoon it was getting crowded at Hickory Hill, as family friends, neighbors, and Justice Department aides — as if drawn by some survival instinct — made their way to the attorney general's side. Surrounded by sympathetic mourners, Robert Kennedy still found time to operate in secret, and he now turned away briefly from his need to protect his brother to seek out who might have gunned him down. His first suspect was Sam Giancana, the Kennedy family's secret helper in the 1960 election and in Cuba. He had been repeatedly heard on FBI wiretaps and bugs complaining about being the victim of a double cross since 1961: Bobby Kennedy had made the Chicago outfit a chief target of the Justice Department, and the mob's take was down (page 8).

Judith Exner, who seems to have had sex with Kennedy and who says she loved him, also screwed him after he was assassinated with a series of stories to which she kept adding as she got opportunities to add them. She is a Hersh source of the Hersh fiction that Giancana won the Illinois election for Kennedy and that made him President. We thus are supposed to believe that if Giancana had that on the President he would have been silent, had not a word to say when he became, Hersh's words, "A chief target of the Justice Department, of Robert Kennedy."

No-sourcing his way to his fortune and his retirement, Hersh reads not only Robert Kennedy's mind here, he had some magical tape recorder that plays the FBI's tapes of its electronic surveillance of Giancana for him to hear. How else could Hersh know that Robert "repeatedly heard on FBI wiretaps and bugs" Giancana "complaining about being the victim of a double cross" by Robert Kennedy?

Clearly this part Hersh just made up. He gives no source and publicly Giancana said nothing.

Exner had two stories about Giancana, other than different accounts of when she became his bedmate, too. One is that the President gave her two satchels of money for her to carry to Chicago and give to Giancana. In one version that money was to pay for the Illinois votes Giancana was going to deliver, another for West Virginia votes. The other version we have seen was a lie, that the President sent money to pay the Mafia for the CIA's plotting to assassinate Castro.

The Giancana election deal was set up, Hersh says, by Robert J. McDonnell (page 136). McDonnell had been a "protégée" of Cook County Chief Circuit Judge William J. Tuohy, who became what Hersh calls the "go between" between Joe Kennedy and Giancana.

Hersh again goes with a single source, as most responsible newspapers would not. Later he adds a bit more about McDonnell. Here he is merely "one of the mob's leading attorneys." But as he continues, having eased McDonnell in this way, Hersh adds a bit more, what makes McDonnell an ideal and very dependable source:

McDonnell, a Notre Dame graduate who was seriously wounded in World War II, was in financial trouble by the time of Tuohy's call for help. His success as a trial lawyer in the state's attorney's office was overwhelmed by his addictions to gambling and alcohol; by the early 1950s, he was constantly in debt and little more than a paid mouthpiece for the outfit. In 1966, he was found guilty of passing forged money orders; his license to practice law was suspended but not revoked. McDonnell renewed his legal practice in the early 1980s but lost his license after a second conviction for the attempted bribery of an electrical workers union official. In 1983 McDonnell married Antoinette Giancana, Sam Giancana's daughter; they were divorced in 1995 (page 136-7).

McDonnell, it turns out, had been Tuohy's "protégé" when both were prosecutors. A prosecutor turned top lawyer for the mob is a fine source, particularly when he is "addicted" to "gambling and alcohol" and was always in debt and was even convicted "of passing forged money orders." The real question is, is Hersh more dependable when he has no given source at all or when he depends on a McDonnell Giancana son-in-law as his source?

Next Hersh admits that Joe Kennedy needed no go-between with Tuohy:

McDonnell's account was buttressed by interviews for this book demonstrating that Joe Kennedy did have a long-standing, if little known, friendship with Judge Tuohy. Tuohy's two sons, Patrick and John, both lawyers, told me that they knew nothing about a meeting involving their father and Sam Giancana, but they recalled Joe Kennedy — "the Ambassador" as he liked to be called — at casual dinners in their home after the war. John Tuohy told me that his father and Joe Kennedy attended a Chicago Bears football game together in 1947. Both Tuohys also said they knew McDonnell as a lawyer who, as Patrick put it, had fallen "off the normal track." Patrick added, "I'm pretty sure my father knew him" (page 137).

Whether McDonnell's marriage to Giancana's daughter make him even better, more dependable source or not, Hersh does spare us an explanation of why when he needed no go- between and, when ordinarily one would want no witnesses, Joe Kennedy used McDonnell to set this up with his old pal Judge Tuohy with whom, as far back as 1947, the judge's children remember Kennedy and their father going to football games together and Kennedy as his dinner guest at "casual" dinners.

Among the many reporters and professors who do not believe this Hersh revisionism, taking credit for stealing that election from Chicago's then Mayor Daley, of which there are many accounts, full of details, is that other Pulitzer winner, Garrow. This is how his "Double Dirty" review for Newsday concludes:

Exner now, in her conversations with Hersh, has altered and amplified in significant ways the recollections she first publicly voiced more than 20 years ago.

Exner may be telling the truth when she now adds to the record a completely new story about how she carried several hundred thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills from Kennedy himself to Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, another Exner friend. Precisely why Kennedy would be sending money to the mob, rather than vice-versa, is a problem Hersh conveniently evades, but sometimes stories are too good to be true, especially when the person telling them didn't put them in her initial "tell-all" autobiography but now can use them as a way back into the national limelight.

Again and again Hersh makes a mess of his badly undersourced and underdocumented claims of Kennedy family ties to organized crime. Hersh thinks he has some evidence showing that John Kennedy's father, Joe, paid Giancana to take an active role in the 1960 election; Hersh then also voices the additional claim that the mob was channeling its money to the Kennedys. Most writers would think this two-way flow requires some explanation or interpretation, but not Hersh: since both stories of course reflect badly on the Kennedys, Hersh is all too happy to push both of them forward, even if the resulting mishmash makes no sense whatsoever.

Problems of similar magnitude occur again and again. When Hersh gets to Castro's Cuba, he dredges up a former Army sergeant who "vividly recalled" having helped to arrange a private CIA briefing "for Senator Kennedy" prior to the 1960 election. Only several sentences later does Hersh acknowledge that his sergeant "was not allowed to attend the briefing and did not actually see Kennedy at the safe house"; the bottom line here is that there's absolutely no firsthand evidence that any such "safe house" briefing ever took place.

Hersh is so consistently credulous of any and all claims that reflect badly on John Kennedy -- or his relatives — that "Dark Side" becomes less and less believable the more of it one reads. Indeed, the book's biggest biographical puzzle is not about John F. Kennedy, it's about Seymour Hersh: How can someone with his prior track record, which includes a Pulitzer prize for reporting on the My Lai massacre, self-destruct in a way that leaves his professional reputation in tatters? That's a more intriguing mystery than any of the Kennedy ones. Hersh fails to solve.

This single paragraph Newsweek of November 17 says it all succinctly. It begins repeating what Hersh wrote, that Giancana was

heard by government bugs boasting about his ties to Kennedy. All possible — but Hersh never stops to ask why the Kennedys needed Giancana to fix the Chicago election when they had Mayor Daley's machine to stuff the ballot box. Hersh also neglects to ask why, if Giancana held such a big I.O.U. from the Kennedy family, Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department so vigorously investigated Giancana (G-men even tailed the mobster onto the gold course).

As usual, Daley delivered the union vote, not Giancana.

There is a nice touch as the novelist in Hersh continues with his supposedly "radioactive" first chapter. He writes that at the Andrews Air Force base in nearby Maryland, Air Force One with the corpse, the Kennedy party and the President and his party landed, "There was a sorrowful embrace between the President's brother and his widow." In fact Robert was able to get on the plane unseen, though the pilot's door before anyone else could and before the casket with the body in it was moved at all. So, Hersh does not know anything at all about what was, of course, quite "sorrowful." He could assume the embrace but he has no source for it.

Hersh the resumes his canard about all those dirty secrets that Robert had to sneak away rather than tell the truth, that for each president taking his own papers was the country's norm.

"Bobby was taking no chances," is the sinister way Hersh puts it, so he "had already ordered his brother's Oval Office and National Security Council files be packed overnight and shipped [sic] to a sealed office by the crack of dawn Saturday, November 23." Of course, as Hersh also admits, that Johnson was demanding immediate possession of those offices was not a Hershian factor (page 9). Hersh then does say, having gotten as much of his nastiness and misrepresentation in as he dared, that "Johnson agreed to twelve noon" for his taking possession of the JFK offices. Not that Johnson did not have his own right there, as Hersh also does not tell the reader, in that Executive Office Building.

Hersh actually refers to this completely normal removal of the President's papers as a "cover-up" (page 10).

The Historian, Bernstein, referred to Hersh's writing as "deceitful." To refer to this wretched, deliberate dishonesty that slanders the assassinated brother of the assassinated President for doing what is always done, what was right and proper, as no more disreputable and dishonest than "deceitful!" is to praise it. Hersh is an experienced reporter and an experienced Washington reporter. In writing this carefully-crafted deception and lies he knew what he was doing — and that is why he did it. In and of itself, it is impossible to exaggerate how despicable, how vicious this writing is. In context it is even more so.

Johnson could not wait for anything. He had his own office with his own staff in the same building in which the President's staff was housed, next to the White House. There was no urgency in Johnson taking possession of the White House offices. But as we saw, he wanted Kennedy's secretary out immediately and then he gave her until noon the next day — while she was in mourning she had to pack.

In Dallas, Johnson had his own airplane, a duplicate of the President's. But that did not satisfy Johnson. Without speaking to the widow who was so deep in sorrow, Johnson took over the Kennedy plane with the Kennedy corpse and party in it instead of using his own. Using his own duplicate of it was for all practical purposes the same thing as taking possession of Air Force One, which was loaded with people in deepest sorrow.

With this what Johnson was doing that was known when there was no necessity for any of it, what could have happened to any records left behind had to be a concern. Not because they had those alleged dirty secrets in them but because they could have been discarded by the Johnson people who could not wait to take full possession. There was also the possibility, given the Johnson record, of using them selectively, leaking them that way, too. But the important thing was to preserve them for the country's history, and that is what was done, in spite of Johnson's indifference to that and Hersh's slurs and slanders.

As Hersh seeks new mud to sling he comes to a story that on its face is not reasonable or even possible:

Another Secret Service agent had the unceremonious chore of bringing sexually explicit photographs of a naked president with various paramours to the Mickelson Gallery, one of Washington's most distinguished art galleries, for framing. In a reluctantly granted interview in mid-1996, Sidney Mickelson, whose gallery framed pictures for the White House in the 1960s (and continued to do so for the next three decades), acknowledged that "over a number of years we framed a number of photographs of people — naked and often lying on beds — in the Lincoln Room. The women were always beautiful." In some cases the photographs included the president with, as Mickelson carefully described it, "a group of people with masks on." Another memorable photograph, Mickelson added, involved the President and two women, all wearing masks. "The Secret Service agent said it was Kennedy," Mickelson told me, "and I had no reason to doubt it." The photographs were always of high quality, Mickelson added, similar to those taken by official White House photographers.

Mickelson told me that the procedure for handling the extraordinary material was always the same. A Secret Service agent would arrive at his shop — ten blocks from the White House — early in the morning with a photograph. "I'd look at it, take the measurement, and then he'd take it back." The agent would return that evening, after the gallery closed, and wait once again in the same room with Mickelson until he completed the framing. He never had a chance, Mickelson told me, to make a copy of a photograph — something he thought about doing — because "the Secret Service agent was always with it."

Mickelson, who was seventy years old when we spoke, told me that he had remained especially troubled by the photographs, and his role in framing them, because at the time his shop was deeply involved in the restoration of the White House, managed by the first lady. "I had a very good relationship with Jackie and I respected her," Mickelson said. "But," he added with a shrug, "my feeling is whatever the White House sends me . . .

"No other White House did this," (page 11).

To believe this is to believe that Kennedy had all those pictures of himself with a variety of women, all of them naked, framed and in the White House for his wife to see and appreciate. Framed pictures that since then nobody has reported seeing, including those who moved the Kennedy personal property from the White House.

And having them framed for hanging! A naked President with various paramours for his wife to see an appreciate?

Framed so the First Lady would be certain to seem them?

So that visitors also would see them?

To say nothing of the White House staff and those others who worked in various capacities in the offices who also had occasion to be in the living quarters?

Where in the White House living quarters would these framed pictures have been hung?

If there is an X-rated room in the White House that is a state secret.

But would hanging pictures like these be appropriate in any other room, particularly one to which the President's wife had access?

Not only can this story not be believed, Sidney Mickelson himself does not believe it. Time spoke to him:

In a few cases, credible sources for his book who were contacted by Time say Hersh's account of their stories differs from what they recall telling him. Hersh writes that during Kennedy's presidency, a Secret Service agent brought "sexually explicit photographs of a naked President with various paramours" to be framed at the Washington art gallery of Sidney Mickelson. In some pictures, Hersh says, JFK appears among a group of people wearing masks. But Mickelson now insists that what he described to Hersh was just two of three masked figures in a bed with the covers pulled up to their neck. He never told Hersh that the President was among them, he says, and in any case, none of the shots were sexually explicit. "Absolutely not,"he told Time. "There wasn't any picture of anybody naked there" (Time, 11/17/97, page 44).

Time also stated that, "Hersh now says he has sources beyond Mickelson for the photographs story, although he doesn't explain why those sources are not identified in this book" (page 45). But it can explain why he has no source notes.

Nor, if he told Time, did Hersh explain the direct quotations he says are of Mickelson when Mickelson says the exact opposite.

We have not yet reached the Hersh nadir in his "radioactive" first chapter, nor have we approached the outrageous indecencies he just made up for his exploitation and commercialization of our tragic and painful history. For his "score," for his retirement so he would no longer have to write books.

As after this one he should not!

Without the minimum checking — and checking on this was so easy — and without

even thinking about it when thinking about it made the impossibility of it clear — without even looking at the well-known and readily-available, motion pictures of it that are so well known, those taken by Abraham Zapruder of the President being killed, Hersh blames the President and his sex life for his death. Here are his exact and unaltered words:

Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual excesses and compulsiveness. He severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking pool side with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week of September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid upright position. It was far more constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.

Those braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald's first successful shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect — and an excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head. Kennedy's groin brace, which is now in the possession of the National Archives in Washington, was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor was the injury that had led to his need for it.

November 22, 1963, would remain a day of family secrets, carefully kept, for decades to come (page 12).

Nice touch, that last sentence, making up this alleged family secret to include with all the other imagined and made-up family secrets and doing this to exploit the great tragedy that the family and the country suffered.

What Hersh says not only did not happen — it was impossible!

If Hersh had gone to the National Archives himself and asked one of those who helped him, like his "brilliant" Max Friedman, or Jock Friedly, who "did inspired research for this book" in Washington (Acknowledgments, pages 475-6), he and/or they could have seen and for a nominal sum could have gotten a clear photograph of the brace the President war that day. It was nothing at all like the brace that Hersh has for his malignant indecency.

Of course, Little, Brown was not about to direct its developmental editor Peggy Leith Anderson and her "relentless search for facts" to check these kinds of slanders out. The President was dead so if he'd want to sue he could not.

Corby Kummer, Hersh's editor, who had "his fingerprints on every page, every paragraph, every comma," and neither he nor any of the others had any question at; all on reading that the President was wearing a "stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that looked his body in a rigid upright position."

There can't be anyone in the country who did not see the horrifying picture of the President bending, falling over onto his wife after he was shot, so how could he have been wearing a brace that "locked his body in a rigid upright position"? How, indeed, could he have sat down in the seat with his body allegedly "locked in a rigid upright position?"

There is a contract between the family and the government that was actually prepared by the government without consultation with the family lawyer whose identity was not then known to the Department of Justice lawyer who drafted that contract. It denied people access to the President's clothing but it does provide for pictures to be available. For a nominal sum more than thirty years before this writing I bought a picture that includes the brace that the President was wearing.

It was close to the same size as one I wore for more than thirty years after hurting my lower back in a boating accident in 1939. I wore it as a soldier in World War II, here, on the high seas and in Africa. I did all a soldier in wartime does while wearing that brace, including lifting heavy objects. I farmed wearing that belt, and farming includes heavy work. I built the farm building wearing it. I even cleared land wearing it, and that is hard work, often heavy and requires much bending.

All these parts of my life for so many years I had to bend and bend I did, of course every time I had something to pick up.

Those belts, worn at the base of the back, have as their purpose keeping one or a few vertebrae straight in the spine or keeping the base of the spine rigid in the Lumbo-sacral joint.

The President's looked like all other such belts look. Quite likely, the President's was made for him. I took a prescription to the drugstore and got one off the shelf and wore it, as thousands and thousands of people have done and will do.

Without being "locked" in "a rigid upright position."

But if none of this were true it would remain a fact that once that first shot was fired in Dealey Plaza there was nothing anyone could do to prevent what happened. And with, in the official account, less than five seconds for the entire assassination shooting, it would have made no difference whether or not the President "could bend in reflex" after being struck by the first bullet. Nobody else in his limousine did "bend in reflex."

If the President were to bend over, that would be at his hip joint, and if he had been wearing two belts as Hersh says, they would not have prevented that. Or how if they did, could he have sat down in his limousine? Or "bend" over after the fatal shot, as he did?

To blame the President's death on his sex life is what in this conclusion — those quoted are the last words of his first chapter are written to do.

And this, too, is supposedly one of those "family secrets" Hersh says would be "carefully kept" secret "for decades to come, the very last words in this "radioactive" first chapter that Time also referred to as a "tease" for the book.

Is there a better reason for avoiding source notes?

Well, this is one way of getting rich and retiring, the Hersh-it way.

Of course, Little, Brown was not going to worry about slanders and assorted defamations with a first print of more than a third of a million copies, a rarity for a hardback book, especially of supposed nonfiction.

Before this book appeared, after hearing what Hersh said about Kennedy being responsible for the CIA's mafia plot to assassinate Castro, I sent Little, Brown a copy of Edward's report quoted in full above along with a letter in which I referred to what Hersh and Exner were saying as lies by this once-secret official CIA record.

The Little, Brown reply was delayed until after the book was out. Then the publisher wrote that their "Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Hersh's" book was on the New York Times best-seller list, "and we are understandably proud."

She said, too, that "We understand the risks involved in publishing reports on what might be considered unpleasant facts and events," but she did nor refer to any checking of any "unpleasant facts and events," what is done in the once-traditional peer review. But why risk a peer review with that massive first printing and the profits expected from it and from further printings?

Their "obligation," she wrote is "to publish information without repressing details."

That explains why Little, Brown refused to consider publishing the first book on the assassination of President Kennedy, my Whitewash. It refused even to read it when I offered the manuscript to it in early 1965.

Little, Brown then was merely meeting its "obligation" not to "repress" information.

And, I repeat, in the more than thirty years since that book appeared, of all the many of whom it is so critical, not one has phoned or written to complain that in it I referred to him unfairly or inaccurately.

Not the record of this Faking Kennedy with this Hersh-it "journalism."

Hersh-it journalism leads people to believe what is not said but strongly implied — and is not truthful even as presented. This is illustrated in the letter to the weekly Parade by one of its readers, answered in the January 18, 1998 issue:

Q.	In his controversial new book, The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hersh charges that Joseph Kennedy got his son elected President in 1960 by conspiring with mobsters to buy the Illinois vote. What's your view of Hersh's version of history? — Elizabeth F., Bronxville, N.Y.

A.	Pure poppycock. It's true John F. Kennedy managed to win the 1960 election by a razor-thin margin 118,550 popular votes, but he trounced Richard Nixon where it counted — in the Electoral College, 303 to 219 votes. So, even without Illinois' 27 electoral votes, JFK still would have won. The story that Joe Kennedy bought his son the White House is an example of sloppy research and analysis by the ambitious Hersh, who is 60 and once won a Pulitzer Prize.

It is a kindness on Parade's part to refer to Hersh's deliberate to dishonesty as no more than "sloppy."