Chapter 11

Hersh As His Own Exner

As we have seen, the hottest number among Hersh's sources is an ill woman whom by conventional standards is not regarded as of the highest morals and who is, in Hersh's own expressed opinion and stated belief, not only a liar, even when her lying was perjury, but he said of what she told him that it is distinguished by its "distortions and inconsistencies."

These are not the usual standards for credibility but there is nothing Hersh says that Exner said that he does not present as the gospel. Where she "distorts" or is inconsistent," where she contradicts herself, Hersh still presents — depends on — one of her versions as beyond question.

What we have just seen of his chapter on her, which is not all that in his book that depends on her, would not be acceptable if turned in by a student in any decent school of journalism. And he is an experienced, an honored, writer.

Hersh knew what he was doing. That is why he did it.

This is not careless or sloppy writing or what can be attributed to excess haste. Not in a book on which he says he spent five years. What is wrong with this book, what is unfair and dishonest, what is knowingly false, is not accidental. It is conscious and deliberate and it has inspired motive of making enough money from it, enough money to enable Hersh to retire.

If Exner were a dependable source the reality is that most responsible newspapers will not go with a single source. Both the reporters and the papers want more than one source.

But for most of this chapter this be-Pulitzered veteran has only Exner as his sole source.

The single source whose statements he says are characterized by distortions and inconsistencies and the sole-source he also calls a liar and who was a perjurer.

When those writing about the assassination of President Kennedy, the subject on which Hersh flunked out, have sought my advice on theories they wanted to believe I suggest that they apply two tests to it. First that they ask themselves,"is this reasonable?" If they can satisfy themselves that what they have in mind can be regarded as reasonable I then suggest that they ask themselves, "Is it possible?"

Not just ask themselves, of course, but consider each step, each question with all the seriousness possible for them. Only if some theory or belief passes these two initial tests is it worth any more time and effort.

If Hersh had applied these two tests to this chapter, most of this chapter would not exist. If he applied it to his book, his book would not exist.

Other than the President and Exner had a sexual relationship, there is nothing in this long and intendedly important chapter that can survive serious consideration of these two basic questions. The two basic questions Hersh did not ask himself, for all his considerable experience. Knowing the truth, the answer, he went with his fictions anyway, seeing money in them and nothing else and caring about little else.

What is most important in it, what he attributes to Exner is, as we saw earlier and repeatedly, to Hersh's knowledge false. He had and misused the CIA's own memorandum for the record of its plot with some of the Mafia to get Castro assassinated and, having that and knowing what it establishes, Hersh pretends it is not there and instead takes the unsupported word of his distorter, his liar of all those inconsistencies, takes it as beyond any reasonable question when it makes no sense at all and is proven by the official record to be a gross lie. This is also true of the second Mafia/CIA plot, as we saw in the Powers reporting on it.

The essence of this once Top Secret CIA record has been and to Hersh's knowledge was confirmed by official investigation of the Congress. Schlesinger's public interpretation of it, on coast-to-coast TV and in The New York Times, as we saw above, is without refutation or even any Hershian denial. Ditto for Powers.

But, if Hersh does not go with the immature fabrications of his hot-number, star witness, he has little for his book but what he makes up. He has no real prospect of retiring on this book without his hot-number and her hot lies.

Without her fabrications he has so much less, including ever so much less of any basis at all for his intended indictment of Kennedy as a bad President. And that, as we soon see, is Hersh as his own Exner. As she made up what Hersh likes, Hersh himself also made up what he liked.

By the time he finished, after his book was out, Exner was denouncing him. He could not denounce her. But she could and she did denounce him as a liar and she reportedly has refused to speak to him since she read the book.

To say that they deserve each other is not to insult either of them.

Hersh is so excessive that even for Garry Wills, who began his excoriation of Hersh stating, "I am ready to believe nine bad things about John Kennedy before breakfast," what Hersh added to the nine was too much for Wills. As Wills wrote, "The more charges he adds to the score, the more I feel I should be subtracting from it."

The second paragraph in our preceding chapter says of Exner that "She is his proof, his sole proof, of a close relationship between the President and Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. She was, in fact, Hersh's only 'proof' of this and of much more . . ."

There is, in fact, no real proof of any association between the President and the mobster. There is not even a rational reason that there had been any such connection or association of any kind. What Hersh attributes to Exner has no credibility at all. What little he adds to that has no more credibility and what he adds is not any connection between Kennedy and Giancana.

We saw enough of the claimed Exner connection of the two of them and of her childish code she says she used to arrange for their alleged meetings.

(For those meetings, by the way, Hersh, who had Secret Service agents speak to him about Kennedy, does not have a single one of those agents who were required to be with Kennedy all the time ever mention any Kennedy-Giancana meetings. Any meetings they had could not have been without Secret Service knowledge.)

We saw that the nonexisting connections between Kennedy and Giancana were allegedly for Giancana to buy the election for Kennedy; for Kennedy to allegedly pay Giancana for getting Castro assassinated; and for Giancana to get an abortion for Exner at Kennedy's request.

Each one of these alleged associations is a serious criminal offense.

As Hersh did not mention.

We have no way of knowing what Little, Brown did but it is a common practice for publishers to have their lawyers read and render legal opinion on the manuscripts they intend to publish. If Little, Brown did that with this Hersh book it was not only because of the costs of defamation can be great or because the successful defense of even spurious lawsuits can be enormous. Publishers want to know all they can about what they consider publishing. The Little, Brown lawyers should have reported all the crimes alleged in Hersh's book. But even without any legal opinion, those involved with this book at Little, Brown were well aware of the attribution of serious criminal offenses to a President of the United States.

If the lawyers' opinion was then asked on whether the book is probative in its attribution of those crimes, then Little, Brown knew that there is none at all in the attribution of each and every one of these crimes. But again, the people at Little, Brown knew that very well without having to ask their lawyers. They are not babies, they are mature and informed people who do not require law degrees to know that the made-up offenses are serious criminal offenses.

They certainly knew that to be true of conspiring to kill, particularly when the intended victim is a head of state.

In those days abortion was a serious criminal offense, as was conspiring in it.

Buying elections, as even high school children know, is a violation of law.

So is conspiring to do that.

Taking bribes is a crime, as is delivering what is known to be a bribe.

If Exner were truthful about all of this, as she is not, then she confesses to serious crime and is subject to prosecution for them. In just carrying the money she is involved in those crimes, as she is in all the other or alleged criminal acts to which she supposedly confesses for Hersh's retirement if not for the enrichment of our history.

For just about all this time, and having the precise dates, Hersh does not burden his book or his reader with these precise dates, Exner was under what Hersh refers to as the most intense FBI surveillance and it also had her phones tapped. He had her "complete" FBI file obtained under FOIA for his use in the book. He says she sued the FBI and got those records. For some odd reason this is not indexed under Exner or under Freedom of Information but it is stated explicitly on page 322.

And of all the above and more like it all that shows in the FBI records compiled after all its "intense" surveillance of her and its having tapped her phone is that she associated with those Mafia men and others who were their friends, like Frank Sinatra.

Not a single word does Hersh quote from those detailed an extensive FBI files about any Kennedy-Giancana association; any bribery; any vote-buying; any plotting to kill Castro or to pay for that -- and it did have those Mafia men under surveillance, physical and electronic, too. But as we saw earlier in J. Edgar Hoover's May 22, 1961 memo to the attorney general, the FBI reflects no earlier knowledge of this CIA/Mafia plot to kill Castro despite its physical and electronic surveillances of at least two of the principals in it, Giancana and Exner.

With the FBI having both Giancana and Exner under surveillance it does not report her to have been JFK's bag woman who carried the satchels with a quarter of a million dollars in them, and delivered them to Giancana, in public yet.

That not a word of this and of more like it is in those FBI files on Exner (or those on Giancana disclosed earlier to the House assassins committee) did not persuade Hersh not to use any of it.

Why trust the FBI when he had Exner, the Exner he himself described as a liar and a distorter? Did not that make her a more dependable source — for Hersh — than the FBI?

Those bribes that Exner says she carried from California to Kennedy, if picking them up was arranged by phone, then the FBI would have known that. If it shadowed her with its "intensive" surveillance, then it was with her when she picked those bribes up. Not only did that make a criminal of her, it means the FBI knew it or had reason to suspect it and investigate it.

What would also be criminal and would involve the FBI in criminal activity would be for it to have knowledge of a crime or of crimes and then not report it or them. With more than this alleged bribery — with all that Hersh attributes to Giancana and the President and the two of them together, along with Exner, federal crimes are involved — yet not one was reported by the FBI other than the one to which the private detective Balletti confessed to the Las Vegas Sheriff. That led to the CIA's admission of its, not the President and not Exner's, plotting with Giancana et al to get Castro assassinated. We saw the CIA's official admission in full and we saw the FBI's reporting of it. (With which Hersh does not trouble his reader or his book, to which it would have meant real trouble.)

None of this or of anything like it was any kind of problem for Hersh, He has Exner's word and that was more than enough for him and for Little, Brown. Even when as was true so often it was it was all he had.

Under the Freedom of Information Act (and Exner should also have invoked the Privacy Act) the FBI is required to disclose each record to her or to explain why it withholds what it withholds. For each withholding the law requires that the claimed provision of the law be cited. The Acts do provide for the withholding of what is to be used in litigation. But Hersh makes no reference to anything like that.

So we have such incompetence in the FBI that when it sees a self-confessed bag lady delivering her bag and that to a top figure in the Mafia it does nothing about it, not even including it in its surveillance reports.

If Hersh is believed.

Likewise, with Giancana under surveillance and his phone and Exner's tapped, and with the childish code Exner says she used guaranteed to grab FBI attention, it did not follow its prime target, Giancana, to any of those many alleged meetings with the President.

Hersh does not report a single word of what the FBI picked up on its phone taps and is required to have been included in what was made available to Exner under the Freedom of Information Act. But if Hersh had he has no "score," no "retirement," no book that could sell as the one he made up did sell. Had he been honest about this small matter of the phone taps, as we see, his grand project was done, killed in the womb of his cunning mind, so to speak. We see also that Hersh had this information before he saw those Exner reports disclosed to her under FOIA. Hersh had it, as we will have it, from one of his sources, those he avoids specific reference to with meaningful source notes — of which Hersh has none.

Can this be believed — by anyone other than Hersh or by Little, Brown that could see and feel the best-seller with an initial hardback printing of more than a third of a million copies?

And does not the FBI have some responsibility if the President engages in any criminal acts?

Hersh attributes more than enough criminal acts to the President to have justified his impeachment, and Hersh has the FBI totally silent when it allegedly was fully informed about all of this.

Can this really be believed? Could it have been believed by Hersh or by Little, Brown?

Hersh did know better. He knew the truth. But he also knew that if he reflected any of that his five years were wasted, his "score" was gone and with it his "retirement" and the promising book that book that when it was printed, began with more than a third of a million copies in hardback, an exceptionally large first printing.

And he would have that big advance to repay.

We saw in the preceding chapter and earlier that in the Exner mythology that became the Hersh book she was and remained the President's "courier" with Giancana. Although there is no real proof of this, there is what Hersh had that definitely limited the time she could have been such a courier, and that is not what Hersh says in his book. Shortly we come to this and to his knowledge of it.

Hersh said that Exner lied in telling the Church committee that her only relationship with the President was personal, or that she had not been his "courier." However, what Hersh refers to as her lie just happened to coincide with the needs of My Story, her book ghosted by the man with a record of creating lingering myths about the assassination in his earlier book, Ovid Demaris.

Next in the preceding chapter we have the big thing into which Hersh inflated the Hale brothers break-in of Exner's Los Angeles apartment. We saw all Hersh imagined could be attributed to that break-in but that does not exist in fact. It was what he made up, no more. In the Hersh-it version that break-in enabled General Dynamics to blackmail the President into awarding it the contract for the plane when in Hersh's opinion that contract should have gone to Boeing. We then noted that Hersh could pull that one only by avoiding the minimum checking with the obvious sources. Of them, one should suffice.

In what for Newsday was a lengthy story, its Michael Dorman wrote for the November 18 issue what was headlined, Chorus of Castigation On JFK Bio. The subhead is, Critics: Hersh "Facts" Lack Substantiation." Dorman had two paragraphs on that alleged General Dynamics "blackmailing" of the President:

Hersh claims two brothers whose father was the chief of security for General Dynamics Corp. broke into the Los Angeles apartment of one of President Kennedy's supposed lovers, Judith Campbell Exner, in 1962. Two months later, General Dynamics received a $6.5-billion government contract to build the experimental TFX jet fighter. Hersh charges, without proof, that General Dynamics used something found in Exner's apartment to blackmail Kennedy into awarding the contract.

"Hersh's account is utter nonsense," said Adam Yarmolinsky, special assistant at the time to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his chief adviser on the project. "The TFX was going to be used by both the Air Force and the Navy. There was just two main bidders for the contract, Boeing and General Dynamics. Boeing bet that the Navy and the Air Force would win the battle to have two distinct models of the plane, even though McNamara wanted just one. All of Boeing's plans and bids were predicated on two planes. General Dynamics bet McNamara would win and there would be one plane. McNamara won, and so did General Dynamics. That's all there was to it."

The facts were well known but with the passing of time were not in the minds of most reporters, if they had been alive then, and they were readily available to Hersh. But using them would diminish his book, his great "score."

It is not necessary to compare all the exaggerations and worse in this Hersh-it revision of our history that were noted in the preceding chapter but one that represents the most deliberate lying by Hersh and in many areas of his fabricated book, one that is also among the most defamatory of the President, has to do with her alleged pregnancy and his turning to Giancana for an abortion for Exner. We do have more on that in what relates to many of Hersh's fabrications. We come to it soon.

Hersh, as did other CIA apologists and some of its former employees, gives a special interpretation to Robert Kennedy's anger on learning that the CIA had conspired with the Mafia to assassinate Castro. One of those other apologists is also one of Hersh's prime sources, Thomas Powers' The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. It was published originally by Knopf, in 1979. Citations herein are from the Pocket Books reprint.

Relating to the special CIA assassination memo we read in full earlier, Powers refers to former CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston's testimony to the Church committee which, Powers said, Houston also told him, that Robert "Kennedy was mad. He was mad as hell." What made the then attorney general so "mad" was that the CIA had eliminated the wiretapping case he had against Giancana and Rosselli, that their use of the Mafia men "would impede prosecution against them (page 196).

J. Edgar Hoover had the same concern.

They had the case for jailing those Mafia men but the CIA, by using them, ended the possibility of prosecuting them on the wiretapping charge, which had been open-and-shut.

Hersh gives this a nice twist in making up the phone conversation in which he has Kennedy telling Exner not to worry about being questioned, including by the FBI, about Giancana. Hersh has Kennedy telling Exner, "you have nothing to worry about. You've never done anything wrong in your life. You know Sam works for us" (page 310). Being the carrier of graft, or the money to buy assassination and an election of two, being involved in those and other criminal conspiracies, the Hersh account of the Exner life, is "You've never done anything wrong in your life" in the words he puts in the President's mouth.

(In this Hersh fabrication the millionaire President who gave his salary to charities, needed and accepted graft? With all the risk that entailed? All the people who could squeal?)

All of this and so much more like it was well and accurately characterized, from the "evil" of Hugh Sidey's description, to the "sleaze" of Grace Hanan Roeder's letter in USA Today of November 17 to the "Double Dirt" headline on the Garrow review and so much more like it is really, as Robert Reno referred to it, Hersh's "Slop" in which he "Must Learn To Live." Former Washington Post editor, editor of its Watergate days, Ben Bradlee, told Newsday's Rita Ciolli for her November 18 story, "some of this stuff defies belief," which is no exaggeration. Bradlee told Anson for his Vanity Fair article, "What I don't understand is where Hersh is getting all this crap." Which is another word for garbage or slop.

It is all these disgustingly bad things and more.

What is most repugnant, most repulsive, will vary with the individual but the deliberate and dishonest assault on the Presidency is its own kind of subversion in a society like ours.

It would be different if Hersh was not, in this, a deliberate liar and a very big liar at that. He knew what he was doing. He knew that what he wrote to make money was lies. Lies hurtful to the country.

So many that we do not even think of going into all of them!

He made his money and his lies perpetuate in the vast number of copies sold and people reached!

They also do in the millions of people he reached through the extensive advertising and promotions arranged by Little, Brown to sell the book, and through the similar efforts of the Book-of-the-Month-Club, which as we saw, bought this "slop," this "crap" before a word of it was on paper.

Especially because both the President and his brother were the victims of assassinations it is reprehensible for Hersh to lie to have the President responsible for attempted assassinations abroad, as he does.

As Hersh knew when he wrote the exact opposite, neither the President nor Exner nor Giancana had anything to do with the second CIA/Mafia plot to assassinate Castro. Thomas Powers also knew this and other lies in the Hersh book and made no mention of them in his laudatory review of the Hersh book for The New York Times. As Powers himself wrote, as we repeat:

In early April 1962, acting on Helms's explicit orders, Harvey asked Colonel Edwards to put him into contact with John Rosselli, and a few days later the two men were introduced in Miami by the man Edwards had assigned as Rosselli's case officer James O'Connell. Harvey got off on the wrong foot with Rosselli by telling him to break contact on the Castro operation with Robert Maheu and Sam Giancana. Harvey had apparently decided the two men were superfluous and untrustworthy as the result of an episode eighteen months earlier, in October 1960, when the CIA/Mafia plot was first getting under way. At that time, Maheu, as a favor to Giancana, had hired a private detective to tap the Las Vegas phone of one of Giancana's girlfriends in order to discover if she was being unfaithful to him. The tap was discovered by a maid, the detective was arrested by local police, and Maheu was told to square it or else (Pocket Books edition, page 188).

(Powers, not having the Hersh-it ambition to retire on his book, refers to this as it was, not as was made up for the Hersh book, a "CIA-Mafia plot". It was not a Kennedy/CIA/Mafia plot.)

As we saw earlier, Helms was not able to tell the Church committee of any orders or authority he had to get Castro assassinated. He claimed he knew what was wanted of him and did it, or that he got his orders by mind reading or by mental telepathy. In plain English, this was a CIA assassination conspiracy of which no Kennedy knew a thing. More bears on this. For example, that Giancana and Maheu were kept out of it, had no knowledge of it at all.

(Hersh refers to O'Connell three times in his book, pages 173, 165, and 212, and in connection with CIA efforts to assassinate Castro, but Hersh does not refer to his seeing to it that Giancana and Rosselli had no connection with — did not even know about this plot — that Hersh says Giancana ran for the President. We come to more on these many dishonesties, especially by Hersh, in his book in which the Powers book was a major source.)

As we see, when the President was informed by the FBI that Exner had phoned him from Giancana's home phone that "relationship lapsed" (Pocket Books edition, page 444).

But the only connection Hersh claims connects Kennedy with the plotting is Exner, who to Hersh's knowledge simply lied about this, as we see immediately above. Powers, who also makes no mention in his review of this serious criticism of Hersh's work and his book, also wrote that, and these are the concluding words of the passage that is about to be quoted, "So far as the record shows, during the second phase of the Rosselli plot Helms was the man in charge":

By September, 1962, when Rosselli told Harvey another three-man team was to be sent to Cuba, Harvey had concluded the operation was going nowhere. He had run the operation with extreme security; none of the men who even worked for him on Task Force W knew what he was up to, or where he was going when he disappeared for a few days every month or two. Bissell had given him the Rosselli operation, Helms told him to give it a shot . . . [Then CIA Director John McCone was not informed.]

The reason for their coyness with McCone is unclear. According to the written record, Harvey frequently discussed the Rosselli plot with Helms during the eleven months — April 1962 to February 1963 — while Harvey was running it, but both men agreed to tell McCone what they were up to. McCone later claimed that he had known nothing about the assassination plots, and CIA documents on this episode, at least, would seem to bear him out. (Pocket Books edition, pages 188-9).

Like Hersh, Powers, who is the defender of the CIA, would like to allocate responsibility for its efforts to get Castro killed to the President but he not only lacks any such evidence, the two cases he cites with his giving them such a meaning are in fact two instances of the President's having said firmly that he opposed assassination.

As the Senate's Church committee said in its report, Powers wrote,

Despite all the evidence gathered by the Church committee, it never found anything like an order to kill Castro in writing, and it never found a witness who would confess explicitly that he had received such an order in person " (Pocket Books edition, page 196).

This is Hershian tricky writing. Converted from its pro-CIA propaganda writing language, the committee really tried, including by giving CIA witnesses all the time in the world, and they could come up with no such evidence at all, not of any kind or in any form. Regardless of what the CIA and its Powerses and its Hershes would like to be able to say and stretch fact and the language to hint at.

While much of the source note Powers has on this is repetitions of what we saw earlier, in fairness and in an effort to reflect how early it was after the first CIA/Mafia plot was exposed that the President "lapsed" his relationship with Exner — meaning to Hersh's knowledge, of course — that entire note is included:

73 The episode is described in three different sections of the Assassination Report: pp. 77-79, pp. 103-4, and pp. 125-134. Briefly, what happened was this: A man hired by Robert Maheu to wiretap a Las Vegas apartment in October 1960 was arrested by local police. Maheu told the FBI the tap was connected to a CIA operation, and Sheffield Edwards subsequently confirmed the story on May 3, 1961. Some months later, however, the FBI discovered that a girlfriend of Giancana's, Judith Exner, had been calling President Kennedy on Giancana's home phone. This was brought to the President's attention and the relationship lapsed, but it apparently helped to retrigger the FBI's interest in the wiretap case, which also involved Giancana, since the Las Vegas tap had been placed on the phone of another Giancana girlfriend, Phyllis McGuire. Hoover insisted that the CIA explain fully why it opposed prosecution. Houston and Sheffield Edwards briefed the Attorney General on the pre-Bay of Pigs plot on May 7, 1962 (Pocket Books edition, page 444).

(In his first note for this chapter Powers says that the committee drew heavily on the Inspector General's report, "especially" on those points "having to do with responsibility for the plots," but the CIA IG's also could not reflect any Kennedy authorization of any assassination plots (page 432). Meaning also that the CIA did not and could not.)

Because all of this was known to Hersh and because it is utterly destructive of his personal and professional reputation — he knew all of this and more in writing the lies from which he made a fortune — it is appropriate to note once again why Hersh has no source notes. Had he provided these citations among those he twisted and distorted from the Powers book, he would have eliminated his book as his "score," as his "retirement."

Hersh and Little, Brown, which would have known, would not have been able to use what they did from Exner and without that, really there is not much of a book left. Only what Hersh made up.

This is but a tiny bit of Hersh on Exner. There is much less from Exner about Hersh, and there is a vast difference between what Exner said about Hersh before she read what he wrote (not that she learned from Demaris!) And what she read in the book.

As Anson said in his Vanity Fair article, this is how they began:

But the liaison that riveted Hersh was John Kennedy's affair with Judith Campbell Exner. When the relationship surfaced during the Church-committee hearings, Exner said it was merely innocent coincidence that while sleeping with Kennedy she was also involved with mobster Sam Giancana and was a friend of Johnny Roselli, both of whom were later murdered. Then, in 1988 Exner said she'd been not only JFK's lover but also his carrier pigeon to the Mob.

Exner backed up her claim with travel records showing frequent back-and-forths between JFK. and Giancana at the height of the Castro plots [Author's note: travel records establish the cities traveled to and from but not with whom anyone met in them.] When Ewing produced logs listing Giancana and Exner's telephone calls, Hersh began searching for a go-between. After trying columnist Liz Smith, he settled on a lawyer and Exner confidant. Impressed by Hersh's evidence that former C.I.A. director William Casey had ordered wiretaps on Exner's phone, the lawyer set up a meeting at her California home.

They hit it off splendidly "Hersh is incredible," Exner gushed to Smith. "I know he is going to reveal the large part Bobby Kennedy played in the C.I.A.- Mafia-Castro business."

Liz Smith has millions who read her Los Angeles Times column that it syndicates.

Those millions knew about Exner and were potential customers for the Hersh book. Smith did a number of column items on Exner and plugged TV shows with her before airing. Then Exner read the Hersh book. After that this item in Smith's December 23 column:

Exner no longer speaks to Hersh. "He quoted an FBI agent against me in his book although there isn't a scrap of evidence to support the man's story. He told me over and over, 'People will never ever think of you in the same way after my book is printed.' Frankly, I think people must think worse of me now. Seymour knows I did not sleep with Jack and Sam at the same time, and I only had intimate relations with Sam once. But he uses all this stuff I have repudiated from a book that I told him from the beginning was full of lies, as if now he believes it is a real source. 'You can't rely on my so-called life story in any way,' I told him."

That Exner no longer speaks to Hersh may cost him little sleep. She does say, as the record bears out or should if Hersh did his homework, that he knew in advance that all he took from the Demaris book that was supposedly Exner's "was full of lies."

As Robert Reno said, Hersh has to learn to live in his own slop.

With the book first out that was a profitable way to live and Hersh was well prepared for it, having created it. Having lived with it through its creation.

If this is not by any means all that can be said about Exner, it is more than enough to justify asking, how could it be published in a book and how could that book be published by a prestigious publisher with an enviable record of publishing fine, worthwhile books that are essential if a free and representative society is to be preserved?

What happened to the, once traditional practice with nonfiction books, peer review of them?

Not that Little, Brown required outside per reviews to be aware of the Hersh fraud it was to publish to make money and for no other reason.

But if by any chance any peer review was needed, what in a book review for publication, what Garry Wills wrote for The New York Review of Books, and that when he was rushing to get it in, what he said was more than enough to have told Little, Brown, had it been a peer review, that it was considering publishing a fraudulent, dishonest book that would deceive and mislead many people and would contribute to the widespread disenchantment with government that has been increasing since President Kennedy was assassinated.

It would not have been inappropriate, given the fact that Hersh's was obviously critical of Kennedy, to have had a peer review by one of the many who had been in a major position in the Kennedy administration and who could know whether what Hersh wrote in criticism was fair and honest or not.

But because he does have an anti-Kennedy record let us see a bit of what was immediately obvious to Wills as he hurried his review to get it to the publication. What little we here see of that review is what with any competent and honest peer review Little, Brown would have been told, would have known about what it was considering publishing:

Ms. Exner, who naively says that the President loved her, now has a motive for saying that he trusted serious matters to her, even though it means she has to contradict what she told the Church Committee back in 1975 and what she wrote in her as-told-to book of 1977, My Story. Then she said she passed no communications at all between the two men. But now the sixty-three-year-old Exner, debilitated by a long struggle with cancer, assures the eagerly listening Hersh that the messages she carried to Giancana proved Kennedy's love for her: "He was bringing me into his life, and that was very important to me . . . He had to have great trust and faith in me."

Of course Ms. Exner has, like all of us, read about the CIA's attempt to use Giancana to assassinate Castro, so — sure enough — Kennedy relied on her to send messages and documents to Giancana dealing with this explosive matter. What documents? Hersh might have asked himself at this moment. Maps of Havana, formulas for poison pills? But that would spoil the good story Hersh is positively salivating over by now. Anyone puzzled by the way Hersh fell for the story of Laurence Cusack, a man passing him forged documents about Marilyn Monroe, has only to read this book to wonder what he would not fall for if it fit his purpose. He even believes Campbell when she adds more people who trusted her with incriminating materials. She made trips taking things to killer Johnny Rosselli as well as to Giancana. She arranged two meetings with Giancana after Kennedy became President. When she became pregnant with Kennedy's child, she and the President decided she must have an abortion. Where did Kennedy turn for that? By now you expect it: "Would Sam help us?" The President wants to incur a debt that gives precious knowledge of a scandal to the Mafia boss. Sounds believable to Hersh.

(That Cusack and Monroe part relates to Hersh having Kennedy and Monroe as lovers, for which he had and needed no proof at all, with Kennedy signing an agreement to take care of Monroe's mother in return for Monroe's silence. About that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, addressing the intended use of that by Hersh and Mark Obenhaus in the TV version, "How on earth did those two geniuses believe for a second that Kennedy would put something like that on paper?" The question might be applied to more of what Hersh wrote.)

Referring to what Hersh wrote about that alleged General Dynamics blackmail,

Even if that hypothesis were granted, it would still not add an ounce of credibility to Exner's claims that she was a courier taking money and documents from the White House into gangland. Even if the break-in artists knew of these, did they expect her to keep copies after she gave them to Giancana?

What were the intruders after? Love letters? Were they placing a recording device? In any case Hersh is sure it had to do with Kennedy and with General Dynamics. He assumes what needs proving when he says: I tried unsuccessfully to find out how General Dynamics learned of Judith Exner's ties to Jack Kennedy." That sentence assumes (a) that Hale's sons did nothing but at the behest of their father, (b) that Hale did nothing but at the behest of General Dynamics, and © that the only reason to be interested in Exner was Kennedy. But Exner had more public ties with Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana than with Kennedy. Hale's sons may have had an agenda of their own. Hale, as an ex-agent with security skills for sale, may have had other clients, or free-lance interests. Why would General Dynamics, on the improbable hypothesis that it knew of the Kennedy-Exner connection (which Hersh himself calls a closely kept secret), have commissioned an illegal act making the corporation subject to blackmail from Hale, on the off chance of finding something with which the corporation could corrupt the whole procurement process? (Hersh, as usual, writes as if Kennedy acted entirely free of government machinery, defiant of other pressures from powerful players.)

Those few excerpts from the longer review that would have ruined many if not most books reflect what ordinary common sense should have told Little, Brown and what could have been expected at greater length and in more detail if it had sought the once traditional competent, informed peer reviews as United States publishers once did as a matter of routine with controversial manuscripts said to be nonfiction.

Referring to some of what Hersh wrote and Little, Brown both published and publicized as merely preposterous is to praise it. Like with the government he headed seeking to prosecute Giancana, which Giancana knew only too well, the head of that government would have put so much in Giancana's hands that he could use to avoid prosecution. Not only that kill-Castro stuff, with which no Kennedy had any connection, but even asking him to arrange for an abortion for Exner for what is represented as the President's unborn child.

No wonder Wills's first words harkened back to Alice in Wonderland!

Little, Brown did not publish Hersh acting as his own Exner because it believed or had any reason to believe that it would be publishing a major and worthwhile record of the nation's history.

If there was anybody at Little, Brown with the intelligence of the average teenager there are two short excerpts from this chapter that would have told Little, Brown all it needed to know.

What Hersh gave it, coming from Exner, was a bigger load than had ever been dumped on a President before. Of this President she set out to ruin, Exner gave as her reason that "I was doing something for someone I loved dearly" (page 307). And on those secret envelopes about assassinating Castro she says Kennedy gave her to take to the mobster Giancana, those "envelopes were not always sealed" (page 308).

No intelligent teenager could credit either of those Exnerisms but Little, Brown did.

Or, knowing better, published a book that is a national disgrace.

(Of course, it had that very large advance to recover.)