Chapter 7

The CIA Created Its Own Assassination "Authority"

As Hersh rewrites our history for his personal profit, for his "score," his retirement in which he will not have to write books, Kennedy's greatest failures as President were in the Cuba missile crises and in Viet Nam.

Hersh had many other complaints none of which were both new and true. Most are not worth wasting any time on. He uses these complaints, many of which are made up out of nothing, to seem to be making his case that Kennedy was a bad man and a bad President.

His biggest deal also is not new, although after more than thirty years she is recalling what she did not recall earlier and says what she did not say earlier. Judith Campbell Exner, sometimes referred to as a "party girl" and who says she shared a number of beds, including the President's and that of Chicago Mafia don Sam Giancana, is of major importance in Hersh's rewriting of our history. In the Hersh version of her version she was involved in everything important to Kennedy from his alleged theft of the election that made him President to his alleged efforts to get Castro assassinated and through that to the missile crisis.

One of Hersh's sensations that is new but is not true is that Lyndon Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice-presidential nomination that in time made him President. Hersh asks, "What made Johnson more attractive than the other candidates?" (page 123).

This is also a part of that Hersh-it technique of re-writing history, to ask questions that are intended to be taken as statements of fact and often, as with this one, are not answered.

Nothing made Johnson more "attractive" as the vice-presidential candidate. He was regarded as more useful, not as more "attractive."

However, as is so often true, Hersh has the version he made up. He seems to attribute it to a named source but he does that, to use his word, by "assuming" it:

One account that has not been made public is the late Hyman Raskin's, as recorded in a chapter of his unpublished memoir, provided for this book, and buttressed by interviews with him in 1994 and 1995. In Raskin's account, Stuart Symington was always at the top of Kennedy's short list of running mates. That list was "precipitously and totally discarded," Raskin wrote when Kennedy met early on the morning after his nomination with Johnson and Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House. At the meeting, Kennedy was "made an offer he could not refuse." In other words, Raskin assumed [author's italics], Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice presidency. Raskin could not learn which aspect of the Kennedy history was cited by Johnson and Rayburn in making their threats, but he had no doubt that their morning meeting with Johnson disrupted months of careful planning and put the Kennedy campaign staff in an uproar.

Hy Raskin had been a major strategist and trusted campaign aide for more than two years by the time Kennedy won the nomination; he was much more of an insider than was publicly known (page 123).

(The Hersh who specializes in not having source notes provides no source for his description of the little-known Raskin as "a major strategist" and an insider.")

In most accounts the late Phil Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, is credited with persuading Kennedy to choose Johnson to run with him to appease the south. Also according to most accounts and undenied for decades, after Kennedy decided to offer Johnson the vice-presidential candidacy, he sent the reluctant Robert Kennedy to present his offer the Johnson. But Hersh prefers the Raskin story.

Hy Raskin, who is his sole source for Hersh's invention, that Johnson, supported by House Majority Leader Sam Rayburn, blackmailed Kennedy into selecting Johnson as his running mate.

Clark Clifford was a prominent Washington lawyer who served a number of presidents. Stuart Symington was a prominent Missourian who had held a number of responsible government posts:

Clark Clifford recalled that he was summoned early the next morning — before his morning shave — to another meeting with a disconsolate Jack Kennedy who said: "I must do something that I've never done before. I made a serious deal and I've now got to go back on it. I have no alternative." Symington was out and Johnson was in. Clifford recalled observing that Kennedy looked as if he'd been up all night.

Jack Kennedy was scheduled to host a luncheon later in the day for his immediate staff. He entered the dining room, followed by the usual horde of journalists and cameramen, spotted the avuncular, white-haired Raskin, and, as Raskin remembered it, dragged him to a window seat, saying: "Come with me. I have something to tell you." As they walked, Kennedy asked:

"Have you heard the news?"

"Yes."

"What do you think?"

Raskin shrugged, and Kennedy said: "You know we had never considered Lyndon, but I was left with no choice. He and Sam Rayburn made it damn clear to me that Lyndon had to be the candidate. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened with problems and I don't need more problems. I'm going to have enough problems with Nixon" (page 126).

Hersh has for this mythology but a single source, Raskin, and as we saw, the key words in this Hersh-it version is what Hersh says Raskin "assumed," repeating from page 123, "In other words, Raskin assumed Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice presidency." This is the way it is in the book, but in person, in the Lynda Hurst interview, Hersh said, and she quoted him directly, "I don't make assumptions." He was speaking about just this, and in another unguarded moment Hersh did not refer to it as he treated it in his book, as solid fact. It is no more than Hersh's "theory" based on the Raskin "assumption":

The problem wasn't the apparently non-stop sexual interludes pe se — "Who cares what a guy does privately?" — it was the impact of them, Hersh argues, what they said about Kennedy's reckless character.

The cavalier and compulsive womanizing, whether with a known commodity such as Marilyn Monroe or with an unknown parade of professional hookers, was dangerously over-the-top and presented a constant risk to his safety, let alone blackmail. Which is what Hersh theorizes Johnson did to force the vice- presidency out of a reluctant Kennedy.

"Everyone's going batty over that," he shrugs, "It's my theory that LBJ had a sex scandal on him, but I don't say that because I wasn't in the room."

He wasn't in any of the other rooms either, but no matter. If you want unblacked-out government documents or transcribed interviews to back up his claims — not assumptions, "I don't make assumptions" — he's got them. No smoking guns, albeit, but some "very good stuff."

To Hurst, Hersh said of this blackmail invention of his, "I don't say that because I wasn't in the room." In the book he does say that, as a have seen. In the book it is the only means by which Johnson became vice president, which meant in the end President, in this Hershing-up of our history.

His self-contradiction to Hersh is just another illustration of the fact that regardless of truth or fact or earlier lies, what Hersh says at any one time is what he at that time believed would best serve his purposes, whatever he then had in mind.

And, with it all made up out of nothing real and with it in a book rather than in a debate or discussion, Hersh does not have to consider whether Johnson was in any position to raise any question about anyone else's sexual conduct or misconduct. If Hersh had had the interest he would have had no problem locating those who could have provided him with similar Johnson stories. Johnson is publicly alleged to have fathered a bastard and a book was written about that

quite some time before the Hersh book appeared. (Texas in the Morning, by Madeleine Duncan Brown, Conservatory Press, Baltimore, 1997)

Among those critical of Hersh over this is Garry Wills. His criticism includes another Hershed-in element of history, that Kennedy was going to replace Johnson in the 1964 campaign:

The same weak hold on political reality shows up in Hersh's treatment of domestic politics. He is so focused on the Kennedy brothers as filling the whole scene that he seriously claims that Bobby was plotting to replace Lyndon Johnson as his brother's running mate in the 1964 campaign. That would make no possible sense. The South would be doubly offended — by Johnson's ouster and by the promotion of a man bitterly hated in the South for his civil rights activities as attorney general. Most sensible people would resent the nepotism. The Democratic Party would surely resist being treated as a personal fiefdom. And Bobby was more useful at Justice, where he could deal with J. Edgar Hoover from a position of law enforcement. Only a man who has lost whatever political sense he may have had could take such a scheme seriously.

The same is true of Hersh's claim that Johnson, with the help of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, blackmailed his way onto the ticket with Kennedy in 1960, threatening to reveal some dark secret if he were not given the job. Actually, of course, Johnson had used the blackest secret — the Addison's disease — in an unsuccessful effort to eliminate Kennedy. He was not believed. That would hardly make him sanguine about the usefulness of further "revelations." Besides, how credible would any such threat be to Kennedy? Johnson could not make good his threat without defeating the Democratic candidate, incurring his own party's wrath, and destroying any future chance he might have at the presidency. Rayburn, who is supposed to have joined in this threat, was a devoted Democrat with his own lifelong reputation at stake.

Richard Bernstein also addressed this Hershian imbecility in The New York Times of November 13. After saying, as we quoted him earlier as saying, that Hersh when "closely examined, is" not "persuasive" and is "downright deceitful," Bernstein saw in Hersh "the serious problem that some of his allegations derive from a technique of writing history that calls for a powerful sense of skepticism and mistrust." Then:

Hersh stitches together skeins of circumstantial evidence with suggestive but ambiguous quotations; then he ignores contrary evidence in order to reach the darkest conclusion that the material appears to allow. His conclusion that Johnson threatened Kennedy into making him his running mate in 1960, probably by using information he had about his sexual misbehavior, is an example of this dubious technique.

Hersh begins with a well-known fact: that there was a tense night of complicated and secret negotiations the night after Kennedy's own nomination during which Johnson, who had not been a strong candidate earlier, suddenly emerged as the choice.

"What made Johnson more attractive than the other candidates?" Hersh asks. His answer is that Johnson, in cahoots with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, blackmailed Kennedy into giving him the nomination. To support this thesis, Hersh relies on interviews with and an unpublished memoir by a Kennedy adviser named Hyman Raskin, whom Hersh identifies, without much support, as "more of an insider than was publicly known."

Raskin says that Kennedy, in a meeting with Johnson and Rayburn, "was made at offer he could not refuse." Raskin himself does not seem, in Hersh's account, to explain exactly what that offer was. Nonetheless Hersh goes on to explain in his own words, "In other words, Raskin assumed Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice presidency."

In this way, Hersh, the only figure in this tale to use the explosive term blackmail, moves from ambiguous on-the-record remarks made by his sources to dark, dramatic ironclad conclusions of his own. In the case of the Johnson vice presidential nomination, millions of words have been written by historians and memoirists, and while they do not all agree none has explained events as a matter of blackmail.

Other writers have shown, for example, that Rayburn, who was very close to Johnson, was initially opposed to his accepting a vice presidential offer from Kennedy, but that Rayburn changed his mind. When Johnson asked the reasons for his switch, Rayburn, in an often-cited explanation, said, "I'm a wiser man this morning than I was last night."

A perfectly logical explanation is that Rayburn and Kennedy, while both reluctant for then own reasons to have Johnson be vice president, came to accept that Johnson, a Southerner, gave them their best chance of defeating Richard M. Nixon in the election

Hersh does not cite that Rayburn remark . . .

"Skepticism and Mistrust" are a minimum essential in reading Hersh.

The Wills summary underscores the political imbecility of this Hersh fabrication: "Johnson could not make good on his [alleged] threat without defeating the Democratic candidate." This means also defeating himself by "destroying any future chance he might have at the presidency" and within his own party, which he would have ruined in that election. Rayburn as a part of any such threat would also have ruined himself within the party, as he would never had done.

Besides Kennedy and Rayburn had a friendly relationship. When Rayburn was ill and Kennedy was in the Congress he flew to Texas to visit Rayburn when he was hospitalized. (I have the personal account of the policeman who was Kennedy's escort then, as he was in the assassination.)

Hersh exaggerates Raskin's importance enormously. Others who wrote about Raskin's political influence evaluate him as not really having much and not being in a position to be able to write from personal knowledge and without exaggeration what Hersh says he quotes from what he says Raskin wrote and has not published.

What Harsh attributes to Johnson and Rayburn would have been, for each, a form of political suicide, is contrary to their political records, and is so far-out nobody else has ever mentioned anything like it after all those years. Except that for his "score," for the bundle Hersh intended to make from this book he needed length and detail he could have said what he says in several chapters in a few words. What he regards as important in them is not new and is not avoided in this in this examination of his book. But, as stated earlier, there is so much that it is not worth taking time for. So much that is made up for his special purposes. So much that is not true and, if it were, would not be of any real significance. So much that he intends to convey what he does not come out and say, some leading to what follows in the book.

Hersh makes a big thing of Kennedy and Cuba, holding that to be one of what Hersh represents as Kennedy's great failures. So, throughout the book he has bits end pieces worked in as usual, without regard to whether true or supported by any evidence of any kind.

In his chapter, "Trapping Nixon," and nobody trapped Nixon other than Nixon, with his usual defense of the CIA of which he writes uncritically, as he must to have his book, Hersh says,

Kennedy did not need Richard Bissell to tell him about the Republican administration's operations against Fidel Castro. He had several other sources who were only too willing, even if it meant betraying their primary loyalties. Not only was there Sam Giancana, who by September was recruited into the CIA assassination planning, but there was also Allen Dulles, who became one of two appointments (J. Edgar Hoover was the other) announced by Kennedy on the day after the election. Both were deeply involved with candidate Kennedy in ways not fully understood before now. Arthur Schlesinger, in his memoir, would call the two sudden reappointment announcements part of the president-elect's "strategy of reassurance" As we now know in the case of Hoover, reassurance of the electorate had nothing to do with it. Was the Dulles reappointment also a reward for past confidences? While there is no explicit evidence that during the campaign Dulles told Kennedy, or arranged for Kennedy to learn, the essentials of the Cuba operation, the fact that Kennedy did know before the election of the Eisenhower administration's secret planning for Cuba. If Kennedy knew that Dulles, his old family friend, had chosen to keep make-or-break information from him, why would the pragmatic old tough-minded president-elect honor that disloyalty by immediately reappointing him? (pages 174-5).

Hersh leads into this mishmash of fact and conjecture with an aspect of his Hersh-it technique in this book, using what might be regarded as an argument and is not even that and using it to represent established fact: "It would be naive to think that at the height of a close presidential campaign a private meeting between Bissell and Kennedy . . . would not deal with substantive matters" (page 174). There was no "private meeting" with Bissell. Hersh writes that several from the CIA were, among others, guests at a Kennedy dinner party. His "naive to think" line intended to appear to be fact when it was not fact.

There is an official record on this and it goes back to before the days of Hersh's youth. Kennedy was told nothing by the CIA until after he was elected. Then, at his father's home in Palm Beach, Dulles gave Kennedy less than a full briefing on what the CIA was up to as of then in Guatemala.

This is one of the Hersh-it means of inflicting a lie on the readers' minds, telling them that Kennedy had been briefed on Cuba by the CIA when he had not been.

What if would really be "naive to think" is that at a dinner party among the guests at which were two prominent and syndicated columnists, anyone from the CIA would let any secrets out.

From the existing records and as usual Hersh has no source notes, in this as in so many instances there being none for lies or for what he just made up) Bissell told Kennedy nothing at all about what the CIA was preparing for in Guatemala. As we have seen and see further, that Giancana line is also an invention. Besides which all Giancana knew about was what he had just heard from John Rosselli, that the CIA wanted to get Castro assassinated. That told Giancana nothing about Guatemala for him to have told Kennedy about. (Not that he ever told Kennedy anything. He did not!)

The Schlesinger statement Hersh seeks to ridicule is a simple statement of the political reality, that Kennedy did announce his intent to reappoint Hoover at the FBI and Dulles at the CIA as, Hersh's words, "part of the president-elect's 'strategy of reassurance'." The "reassurance" was not only to those agencies. It was to the country and it was a way of saying that Kennedy was being cautious rather than in any way radical.

It is a reiteration of that Hersh-it technique to tell a lie in referring to what he just made up earlier as an established fact, which is what he does when he says "As we now know in the Hoover case, reassurance of the electorate had nothing to do with it." As we really now know, this is part of the Hersh-it line, that Kennedy kept Hoover on because he feared what Hoover would disclose about Kennedy's personal life if his automatic retirement, required under the law, was not set aside. That Hersh line is political infancy. If Hoover wanted to do anything about Kennedy only someone ignorant of Washington, which Hersh is not, did not know that all Hoover had to do was have it leaked, as he had done with regularity and with deniability by him built in.

(I have records that report what he ordered be leaked to which he added notes of pretended amazement in his own crabbed handwriting. He could always produce these notes to reflect his claimed ignorance of the leaking he ordered if it were to be traced back to the FBI.)

Appointing Robert Attorney General, which assured conflict and disagreement with Hoover, is ample reflection that what Hersh makes up was not in President Kennedy's mind.

No-sourcing away Hersh says that the "essentials of the Cuban operation" was conveyed to Kennedy "before the election." According to the official records, this is false. Besides which there was more than one "Cuba operation" by the Eisenhower administration. There was a separate one to get him assassinated. As we have seen in the CIA record it disclosed to me in which, on the highest level, it stated what was known about that plot, that only six people knew about it and they were all six high officials of the CIA. Hersh had a copy of this report and uses part of it with his own special Hersh-it twist, so he knew he was lying.

The last sentence in what is quoted from Hersh's page 175 above is childish, as Hersh is not. It begins with an "if" and then goes on as though it were a statement of fact. As of the time about which Hersh is writing Kennedy had no way of knowing whether Dulles was withholding information from him. There is little any official, no matter how high, can do to learn what the CIA does not want to be known. Kennedy knew what Dulles told him during the interregnum and after that, after being sworn in, whatever he was told in the briefings. But as is well known and was widely published, including in the books Hersh cites, there was information Dulles did not convey to Kennedy and when Kennedy learned it there was not a thing he could do about it.

How tough-minded the President-elect was, how much Dulles may have been a friend of relatives, as he was not of John Kennedy, is not relevant to anything other than as a reflection still again of the Hersh books dependence on his Hersh-it technique of reporting.

It is simply another lie to give the reader reason to believe, as Hersh does here, that Kennedy knew Dulles had withheld information from him before he announced the Dulles reappointment, what Hersh refers to as "make-or-break information."

Which, typically, is without any sourcing.

Naturally enough, there being no source — other than the need for it that Hersh saw for his "score."

The length of this comment on the relatively short quotation from Hersh — a single paragraph — indicates how much would be required to address all he says that is not true. There are other statements in what is quoted that are not true and are included in the above critique. For example, there were no "primary loyalties" that were "betrayed" at that dinner party. Hersh just made that up. He needed to make it up to give the false impression that Kennedy has been told what he had not been told and which for Hersh's purposes, he wanted Kennedy to know. And it is more than the overwhelming Hershian self-puffing-up, it is false for him to say that both Hoover and Dulles "were deeply involved with candidate Kennedy in ways not fully understood before now," meaning before his book. Meaning, really, before what he made up was published.

The Hershian half-truth and untruths, what he makes up and what he infers and presents as fact, the trickery of his writing, are all necessary for his faking of Kennedy, of the man, of the President and of his administration, the faking without which Hersh would not have his book. Or his "score." Or his retirement, if he retires.

As with this book as an example of what can be expected of him, he should retire from writing.

Essential in all of this is making it appear that Kennedy ordered the assassinations he did not order and did not even know about, particularly that of Fidel Castro.

Thus Hersh's fabrication about those "primary loyalties' allegedly betrayed at the Kennedy dinner party with all those people, including those columnists, there and listening.

Hersh tries to carry this forward in his Chapter titled, "Executive Action."

For what he has in this chapter Hersh has no source or he depends on those who had their own anti-Castro involvements to lookout for, the CIA people he used as sources. Still without source notes, by the way.

There is no point in retailing all Hersh's propaganda. A few quotations will be enough. The second paragraph of this chapter gets us started:

In the last few months of the Eisenhower administration, three foreign leaders — Fidel Castro; Patrice Lumumba, of the Congo; and Rafael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic — had already been selected as potential targets of political assassination. The planning, under the aegis of Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, continued without interruption after the November election and throughout the presidential transition period. Political assassination, Dulles and Bissell knew, was not a new concept for the Eisenhower government. In 1953, according to declassified files, the CIA, while plotting the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala, drew up a "disposal list" of fifty-eight Guatemalans suspected of communist leanings, and trained assassins for their murder. The assassinations were not carried out but the released files show that the CIA's plans were discussed in detail at the highest levels of the State Department (pages 185- 6).

In fact political assassinations in Guatemala were in wholesale quantities. They included at least one America citizen and the Guatemalan husband of an American woman who was also a Harvard lawyer and who led the campaign that resulted in what disclosure of this that there has been.

What happened in Guatemala, of which assassinations were but a part, is an authentic CIA horror.

In the paragraph quoted above the sneakiness of Hersh's writing needs attention.

In the first sentence he says that those three assassinations had been decided on "In the last few months of the Eisenhower administration." This implies that the decision was that of the President, Eisenhower. But it does not say that.

The second sentence refers to the planning of these assassinations continuing but it names only the head of the CIA and the head of its dirty-tricks component as overseeing it. Hersh says that political assassination "was not a new concept for the Eisenhower government." Then comes the flashback to 1953 and the CIA's plotting with those who overthrew the elected Guatemalan government. Hersh is trying to make out a case of Kennedy responsibility for assassinations. He has no word of that here. In fact, he does not say, he merely gives the impression that Eisenhower was behind the planned assassinations. We return to this deception.

ZR/RIFLE was a CIA name for an assassinations program. The paragraph that follows is not Hersh's first on it:

After his meeting with Bissell in early January 1961, Bill Harvey had no illusions about what ZR//RIFLE and executive action were supposed to accomplish. He immediately scheduled a meeting with Bissell's scientific adviser, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who could produce a lethal virus or poison on demand. In an interview for this book in 1994, Gottlieb told me that Harvey said, "I've been asked to form this group to assassinate people and I need to know what you can do for me." Harvey kept notes of that meeting, too — notes he did not turn over to the CIA's inspector general in 1967 — and they indicate that the meeting with Gottlieb took place on January 25, 1961, five days after Kennedy's inauguration. The two men specifically discussed Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo as potential targets. Harvey's notes show . . . (page 191).

ZR/ RIFLE existed "in early January 1961 " which was before Kennedy became President. In saying that Harvey spoke to Gottlieb about poisons to use in assassinations on January 25 there is the clear implication that when Harvey did that he did it for the Kennedy administration. No other purpose is served by giving that date. (Hersh is without comment, without criticism in particular, of the Harvey dishonesty in holding his notes back from the official internal investigation.)

Hersh's trickiness with words is again illustrated in our last quotation from this chapter:

In the fall of 1961, Harvey was assigned to what became known as Task Force W, the CIA component in a get-Castro squad that was assembled by the White House. He spent much of the next year and a half plotting to overthrow and kill the Cuban leader — and growing increasingly frustrated about the constant pressure to do so from Robert Kennedy. Harvey's animosity toward the attorney general grew with each failed assassination attempt. It was Harvey's frustration, apparently, that led to a breach of his rules about never talking out of turn. At some point he told a valued colleague, Samuel Halpern, the executive officer of Task Force W, what no one in the CIA would ever tell Congress: that Jack Kennedy had personally authorized Richard Bissell to set up ZR/RIFLE before his inauguration. "After the election," Halpern recalled in one of his many interviews for this book, "Kennedy asked Bissell to create a capacity for political assassination. That's why Harvey set up ZR/RIFLE" (page 192).

There was an official name for what Hersh prefers to poison the readers' minds with in his use of the "get-Castro squad," and it was Operation Mongoose. The words "get Castro" do suggest and are, Goebbels-like, intended to suggest to kill him. This is what throughout the book Hersh tries to pin on Kennedy and does not with any proof, although from his writing the impression is that he did, that Kennedy was behind those assassinations.

"Assembled by the White House?" What is not, in any administration? It was under a star of the CIA, General Edward Lansdale, as we saw earlier.

There was a real "get Castro" squad — the CIA. Those Hersh use as sources, even as sources from the grave, like Harvey, were leaders in that "get Castro" campaign of the CIA's — by assassination — that it seeks to pin on Kennedy. Halpern, used so often at and so many points in this book by Hersh, was the executive office of that "get Castro squad" of the CIA's Task Force W. He had his own involvements in that "get Castro" effort to obscure and hide and on that basis alone no honest writer intending an honest book would dream of using him as a source.

Earlier, from disclosed official documents, was saw what Hersh knew and is deliberately deceitful about, that Operation Mongoose was for the overthrow of the Castro government, if there was an internal revolt, and not for Castro's assassination.

It is a plain and simple lie that Harvey, the would-be assassin, was under "constant pressure" to assassinate Castro from Robert Kennedy.

There is no source given — even hinted at — but if Hersh had a source it can be only the long dead Harvey. His word cannot be taken, not with his record and with his involvements. Especially not when it is second- or third-hand or more remote. He, as were all others in the CIA, was interested in covering himself. He was its chief of assassins! Or would be assassins.

Harvey's word also is particularly worthless in the remote hearsay attributed to him by Sam Halpern, who has his own "get-Castro" involvements to cover-up, that "Jack Kennedy personally authorized Richard Bissell to set up ZR/RIFLE before his inauguration." Not only did Kennedy not have the right to bestow any "authority" before he was sworn in, but, remember that CIA memo on its Castro-assassinations plot disclosed to me and of which Hersh had a copy he used selectively and dishonestly. It is quite specific on the subject of that Castro assassination: only six people knew about it and those six were officials of the CIA. It does not, written as it was after ZR/RIFLE was created, make any reference to it at all!

With regard to this and to the next sentence in what is quoted, where Hersh quotes Halpern, who had no way of knowing about it, as telling him "for the book" if not for covering CIA ass, that "'Kennedy asked Bissell to create a capacity for political assassination. That's why Harvey set up ZR/RIFLE" — which he did before Kennedy was President!

Bissell was involved in several official investigations. He said not a word of this in any of them. He is one who was interviewed for that high-level CIA assassinations memo disclosed to me and reproduced in full earlier and he then also said not a word.

What Hersh does is knowingly repeat CIA lies, lies intended to cover the CIA, which has yet to cite any real authority for any assassination. These lies are indispensable in Hersh's campaign to ruin Kennedy's reputation as President, the project to make Hersh rich enough to retire. But once he had to face the fact that he could not do the contracted book on the assassination and did not dare go with those fakes that were to make so exciting a book, Hersh had nothing left to commercialize other than his attempt to ruin Kennedy's reputation as President.

Earlier we noted that it was wrong for The New York Times to use Thomas Powers to

review the Hersh book, which is a defense of the CIA, and of its director, whose biographer was Powers. This was because Powers was so obviously partisan and had his own reputation to look out for. One of Hersh's least favorable people did react to what Powers wrote and the Times did print his reaction.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is also a Pulitzer winner and is a world-famous historian. He also was in the Kennedy White House. That is enough to inspire Hersh's dislike for him but it also gave him knowledge Hersh and Powers did not have.

What he wrote the Times that the Times published December 21 follows in full:

IN DEFENSE OF JFK

To the Editor:

Thomas Powers, in his review of Seymour M. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot (Nov. 30), praises as "right on the money" Hersh's theories of the Kennedys' "obsession" with Cuba and "especially of the role played by the President and his brother in the C.I.A.'s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro." No one reading the review would dream that the C.I.A. assassination projects (and hiring Sam Giancana and the mob to do the dirty deed) were initiatives not of the Kennedy but of the Eisenhower Administration.

It is a puzzle why those who claim that the Central Intelligence Agency never acts without presidential authorization consistently absolve Eisenhower, on whose watch the Castro assassination plots began, and castigate Kennedy. But I know of no direct evidence — nor did the Church committee uncover any such evidence — that either Eisenhower or Kennedy authorized or knew of these assassination plots. C.I.A. officials testified that they had not even informed John McCone, the man whom Kennedy brought in to clean up the agency. If they told Kennedy about their plots, they would have had to say, "But you can't mention this to McCone" — a bureaucratic improbability. What is more likely is that the C.I.A., like intelligence agencies in other countries, believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials and used the excuse of "plausible deniability" to act as it deemed best without telling those to whom the agency was nominally accountable.

As for the Kennedys' "obsession" with Cuba, Fidel Castro, by deploying Soviet nuclear missiles, presented them with the best possible pretext, one the world would readily have accepted, for invading Cuba and smashing Castro forever. But Robert Kennedy led the fight against this course, and John Kennedy made the decision against it. Some obsession. A year after the missile crisis, the Kennedys were exploring through Ambassador William Attwood the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuba. "On the money"? Powers seems almost as gullible as Hersh.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

New York

Schlesinger said essentially the same things when he appeared on the TV version of the Hersh book. As ABC aired it beginning at eight o'clock Thursday, December 4, it was titled "Dangerous World." After this airing Schlesinger appeared on the Charlie Rose Show on CBS. On it he stated insistently that the CIA did not tell Kennedy about its efforts to assassinate Castro, and that it also did not tell Eisenhower.

There has been no reported contradiction or refutation of Schlesinger of which I know.

Hersh in particular has not been quoted disputing Schlesinger on this in any way, important as his lies about Kennedy and attempts to assassinate Castro are to and in his book.

Before Powers wrote his review it was officially public that the "initiatives" for the assassinations were under the Eisenhower administration not as of the Kennedy administration. We saw the entire official memorandum on this.

It likewise is true, especially, as we have seen, of Hersh, that although those assassination were plots of the Eisenhower administration, it is not condemned for them and Kennedy, who had no connection with them, is condemned — by Hersh.

Schlesinger is not a partisan in this letter. He does state that there is no known evidence that "either Eisenhower or Kennedy authorized or knew of those plots."

The entire Schlesinger letter should be read with care. What is cited from it is more than enough to give the lie to what Hersh says and does and what he is up to in this book that is, at the least, "deceitful," as historian Alan Brinkley stated.

In quoting Hersh's language I referred to as "tricky" above I noted that he was, without saying so in so many words, seeking to hold Eisenhower responsible for the assassination plotting of his administration but Hersh did not say that specifically. He was suggesting it strongly, so strongly that most readers would assume he was saying it.

Schlesinger's citation of the official investigations is that they do not show that either President was aware of the assassinations plotted by his administrations, which really means by the CIA.

The CIA that, as Helms testified, got its "orders" to assassinate by mind-reading.