Chapter 12

"A Man Whose Personal Weaknesses Limited His Ability": Sy Hersh

Evaluation of Hersh's book and what he is up to in it begins with the understanding that he was a reporter, one of the very best reporters, and he was also an investigative reporter, again, one of the very best. There is and there can be no doubt, Hersh knew what is and is not acceptable in reporting and from those who do the reporting. He knows what is avoided, what news is never done in responsible reporting and by responsible news papers. His departures from what is regarded as proper and acceptable, of which we have seen some, are therefore significant. Among their possible meanings is that Hersh could not and knew he could not do what he did and do that within the traditional concepts of what is acceptable, what is traditional in this kind of writing. If he could have, having spent his professional life doing it, he would have. It is because he could not that he did not.

He could not and have had the book he produced if he had.

It is because he wanted what he said he wanted, his "score," his "retirement," which means big money, that he had to do the kind of book he did do.

He could not do that and do it with the standards that made his newspaper reporting of superior merit and value and was rewarded for it with the highest honor in reporting, the Pulitzer.

Hersh knew, once he shifted his book from whatever assassination book he contracted to scandalmongering, when he went so lustily for those forgeries so many of which were transparently fakes, that is his rehashing of President Kennedy's personal life might sell well but would not sell enough to accomplish his objective, make the money he wanted to make from his book, his "score" to be. Moreover, the kind of life Kennedy led was well known and has come to be, largely accepted. Most people thought well of him and just ignored his personal life. For what Hersh wanted he needed more than a rehash of Kennedy's personal life, more than the liberties he took with those details, more than what he said about it that was not only not true but was really not possible.

All this and more should have been obvious to an investigative reporter who was good enough at it to win and to earn that Pulitzer for it.

With the scandalmongering what else Hersh resorted to for his "score" could not be good about Kennedy, or nice in any way. Most people thought well of Kennedy and of his Presidency, so there could be a market in what said good things about him and his Presidency. But that would not fit with the scandalmongering and as the experienced reporter Hersh is knew, it did not have the money-making potential of taking that scandalmongering farther than it had ever been taken.

Much that was critical of Kennedy had been written and some of those books sold well, but they were not profitable enough to be the "score" Hersh said he wanted.

So, what Hersh wanted required being what he could present as scandalous but would not be only more sex stuff; would fit with his scandalmongering that replaced the fakes he had gone for, and to be able to sell well, would have to exceed what had been alleged by others about either Kennedy or his Presidency or both.

For Hersh in this book, that meant, that really required a portrayal of the Kennedy Presidency, as a failure and a portrayal of Kennedy as a bad and a dangerous President, something most Americans did not believe. All the means of evaluating popular regard and respect for Kennedy and for his Presidency showed him to be regarded as the best.

Hersh decided to make his score by presenting Kennedy as the worst.

That is what he says in his book. He says Kennedy took the world to the very brink of its greatest disaster; that he lied to the people to tell them the opposite, even that he as an assassin. The latter we have seen was false and Hersh should have known was false when he said it. As we saw, what he wrote is contrary to the official admissions of the CIA, and it was responsible for those efforts to assassinate, even though he had and misused those official CIA admissions. To be able to seem to make his case Hersh, as we saw, combined using the least dependable of sources, those who were involved in the CIA's anti-Castro, anti-Diem and other operations that included assassinations and who had their own and their professional involvements and the CIA's to cover up. We saw that for all Hersh wrote about Kennedy and assassinations, there was not a word of truth in them and that Hersh, experienced reporter that he is, had every reason to believe that there was not a word of truth in what he wrote about Kennedy and assassinations.

The actuality is that those CIA assassination plots were of the Eisenhower administration, about which Hersh had no criticism of the Eisenhower administration, and that Hersh then attributes responsibility to Kennedy, who had no connection of any kind with them, who despite what Hersh says to the contrary, had no knowledge of them until they were public.

While his wording is as tricky as from his life-long experience with words it can be, Hersh lied in his attribution to Kennedy of any degree of responsibility for those assassinations.

We have also seen that his major new "sources" on Kennedy and those assassinations of which he was not and could not have been part was the tragic figure of the former "party girl" who developed into what appears to be a world-class liar. With both Hersh and Exner liars and with each accusing the other of lying, as we saw -- she is nonetheless his hot number new assassination "witness." That Exner is a liar, Hersh himself admitted. That, in his Hersh-it technique in this book, is all he needed to know about her to make her his major, his "hot number" source for the entirely impossible. Such as Exner carrying Kennedy's money to the Eisenhower administration period would-be Mafia assassins who Kennedy knew nothing about so that he could pay them when in fact the CIA had set a large sum aside to pay them and they had repeatedly refused to accept any pay.

Hersh did what he could with his consummate dishonesties in seeking to place responsibility for the CIA's attempted assassinations on Kennedy when there is no known proof that even Eisenhower had personal knowledge of them or had personally ordered them.

What remained for Hersh to seek to exploit for his "score" was Kennedy's foreign policies. Assassinations, which he wrote about separately as well as part of Kennedy's foreign policies, was one element, particularly that of the Vietnamese dictator who was a real and unpopular tyrant, Diem. Hersh's trickiness with words relating to this is up with his trickiest. He knew he was writing what is not truthful, he even included some of the proofs that it is not truthful, an aberrational honesty.

But Hersh's major rewriting of our history to have the book that required more than scandalmongering about Kennedy's personal life to be his "score" is mostly about Cuba and the Soviet Union, about the missile crisis and its solution. Most of the country and indeed, of the world, regarded that solution as a great success but not Hersh. Hersh presents it as a great, dismal and dishonest failure about which he says the Kennedys lied to the country to hide their cowardly failure and their allegedly placing personal ambition above what to Hersh was the need of the nation.

While to a degree we have addressed some of this, there is more of it that Hersh has in greater detail in the later parts of his book that we have not assessed.

This was so important to Hersh, as he saw importances, it is the way he begins his book, with those allegations in brief and simplified form. Experienced reporter that he is, Hersh knew that nothing excites interest like controversy, and nothing sells books like interest and controversy. He created the controversy and he exploited it in his many appearance to promote and sell the book.

All criticism of it was not by any means from those who can be regarded as Kenney-ites. Like Garry Willis, whose penetrating criticism we saw in The New York Review of Books. His is not a pro-Kennedy record by any means.

The Wall Street Journal is not pro-Kennedy. It is not "liberal." But it as critical of Hersh and of his book. The David M. Shribman review in the November 14 issue said, "Mr. Hersh is a prosecutor, not a historian. He is presenting an argument not an analysis."

Shribman also wrote, "please permit this reviewer to ask you to insert the word 'allegedly' . . ." which by then could not be done with the book printed and on sale.

He refers to Hersh as "coming out of 'The Dark Side of Camelot' as a nattering nabob of negativism."

Shribman could well have used that "alleged" to refer to Hersh as a "prosecutor" because if he had ever taken his "argument" of his to court he'd have been clobbered.

As Hersh, without doubt, knew, Shribman also said that this book is not a "biography." One of the many reasons that, if this had been a prosecutor's brief, Hersh would not have dared let it go to a court, is that he knew the truth. He knew exactly what he was doing and he did it in the expectation that seems to have been justified, that it would make money for him. The book, despite what Hersh says, reflects no other interest or intent other than that his assault on President Kennedy's character is essential to Hersh's purposes, especially his monetary interests.

Another of the many reasons this would-be jerkwater, prosecution brief would not be allowed to go before the court is that Hersh knew he lied throughout. We have and are documenting only some of those lies he knew to be lies.

Unless he is no longer sane he indeed does know!

The would-be indictment and the lies begin with the book's first words, the brief "Author's Note" of less than a page (pages ix and x), The initial "get Kennedy!" lie in this note is that Hersh began writing the book that emerged: "I began writing this book knowing that it would move into a sensitive area . . . the private life of a public man."

Hersh began, as we saw, with a contract for a Kennedy assassination book, not a book on Kennedy or on his private life. That came later, when Hersh went for all those forgeries. When he began he told reporters, one of whom who told me, that his would be a Ruby book on the assassination or that he would focus on Jack Ruby in it.

As we have seen, The Dark Side of Camelot is not the contracted book and Hersh's words are in that respect an additional lie.

He continues with his formula to make money, saying that Kennedy was a bad and a failed President.

Kennedy's private life and personal obsessions — his character — affected the affairs of the nation and its foreign policy far more than has ever been known. This is a book about a man whose personal weaknesses limited his ability to carry out his duties as President.

Not only does Hersh not make out any such case, even go through the motions of trying to, the enormous respect and love for Kennedy among the leaders and the masses of the world were manifest spectacularly at his funeral. Never has any such tragic occasion been honored by so many of the world leaders, including all the major ones. And they all knew they would have that long walk for seniors, which most leaders are, from the church in Washington through Washington and across the Potomac and into Arlington cemetery in Virginia. It is only the passing of more than thirty years, with so large a percentage of the people born after that funeral, that Hersh could dare this king-sized lie of his that is indispensable to his having anything more than a scandal rehash for a book.

The magnitude of the infamous lie can be appreciated if we ask ourselves how many funerals of heads of state our presidents have attended in those more than three decades. Instead they usually sent representatives.

Those quoted and Hersh's last words in this short opening note could not be bigger lies unless he is not rational:

In writing this book, my hope is that I have been able to help the nation reclaim some of its history.

We have and continue to address this most outrageous of his lies. The only association Hersh and this book of his have with history are his corrupting and rewriting of it and in that to profit by it.

He continues his phonied up indictment in his first chapter, titled, inappropriately because it has nothing to do with the events of that day, "November 22." This title is intended to give credibility to another of the many permeating Hersh lies, that Robert Kennedy had all sorts of incriminating records purged from his brother's files to avoid his brother's embarrassment and for that reason only.

Aside from the fact that as we have seen there was nothing unusual in the preservation of the President's record for the President's library, what each president has and is part of the National Archives, it is a lie because Hersh knew nothing about what is in them. He made that up and he had to make it up for his commercialization of the tragedy and to fabricate additional evils that did not exist (and he would have had no way of knowing if they did exist) as a cheap and unprincipled prosecutor would have tried to do.

The extent of these presidential papers about which Hersh has this indecent invention of his, with not a thing factual on which to base it, is indicated by the news reports of the end of 1997 on the ceremonies at the George Bush library at College Station, Texas. It was attended by the three live presidents who could get there. That library boasted that it was the first to open with its computer Web in place. There was immediate computer access to it. That library also boasted that it will contain "over thirty-eight million pages of personal papers and official documents" of President George Bush.

The extent of the conspiracy and the need to hide that Hersh could make up from thirty-
eight million pages of personal and other records of the Bush years as President!

Thirty-eight million pages that should include records of when Bush was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA of which Hersh cannot bring himself to be critical even when it confesses and he has its confession!

But if it had been a legitimate complaint rather than more of his Hersh-it method of writing, Hersh has nothing to say about the other presidential libraries that are, as he knows, loaded with the personal and other papers of all those presidencies. Yet if it was wrong to safeguard, to preserve Kennedy's papers, it was also wrong for all the other presidents to do that, and Hersh mentions not one of them. He has no criticism for the preservation of their papers. Knowing nothing about what was in those papers and making up what he thinks can make him money has become the Hersh specialty. It underscores his intent to be dishonest, to exploit ignorance, along with his endless misrepresentations to make up his nonexisting case that is his "score," his retirement.

Because he knows not a thing about what was in those files — and had no way of knowing — but having the commercial desire to make preserving them seem abnormal and sinister, he begins this part of his assault on the Kennedys and on the Kennedy Presidency with a conjecture. He does not say "The President's files reveal," which, if he were not making it up, if he had any knowledge of what was in them he would say. He begins with what he makes up, his conjecture of "would," saying, "The President's file would reveal." Then what he begins wanting to say that he knew was not true and, as we have seen, he knew what was not true:

The president's files would reveal that Jack and Bobby Kennedy were more than merely informed about the CIA's assassination plotting against Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba: they were its strongest advocates. The necessity of Castro's death became a presidential obsession after the disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and remained an obsession to the end. White House files also dealt with three foreign leaders who were murdered during Kennedy's thousand days in the presidency — Patrice Lumumba of the Congo; Rafael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic; and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Jack Kennedy knew of and endorsed the CIA's assassination plotting against Lumumba and Trujillo, before his inauguration on January 20, 1961. He was much more active in the fall of 1963, when a brutal coup d'etat in Saigon resulted in Diem's murder (page 3).

As we have seen when we went into these matters earlier, there is no truth in what Hersh says. Almost all of it is the opposite of the known, the established and the published truth. But the published truth would not be exciting, would not sell books and would not lend itself to selling books, as Hersh, a reporter, knew.

Warming up and getting more like Goebbels as he goes, Hersh follows this with an attack on the Kennedy Presidency which has not a single word of truth in it (except in spelling):

The Vice president also did not know that Jack Kennedy's acclaimed triumph in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was far from a victory. The world would emerge from fearful days of pending nuclear holocaust and be told that the president had stood firm before a Soviet threat and forced Premier Nikita Khrushchev to back down. Little of this was true, as Bobby Kennedy knew. Knowing that their political futures were at stake, the brothers had been forced to negotiate a secret last-minute compromise with the Soviets. The real settlement — and the true import of the missile crisis — remained a state secret for more than twenty-five years.

There were more secrets for Bobby Kennedy to hide (page 23).

By the time he has finished all that he makes up, finished his book, Hersh has not even made up anything that proves the solution to that 1962 Cuba missile crisis was other than a "victory." It was, for two men, not for one alone. It was for what Hersh stays away from and can not go into, what could have happened if they had not come to a rapid agreement on that very serious unprecedented confrontation that would have meant nuclear war.

It was a great victory for the whole world, as all legitimate authorities agree, that the crisis ended without war, without those nuclear missiles causing unprecedented destruction.

The world did not have to be told the truth. It was obvious and without rational question. The world was deeply concerned because what impended could have been the greatest disaster in the world's history, as Hersh does not go into — does not dare to! The world knew what the dangers were and the realities and it did not have to be told by any Kennedy supporter when Khrushchev did back down and remove his missiles and their nuclear warheads and much else, like the bombing planes from Cuba.

Kennedy did not "stand firm?" Then why are those missiles still not in Cuba, or why did they not fly in October, 1962?

Was it that their "political futures" were "at stake" that led the President, with his brother's help, to get a Khrushchev agreement to remove those nuclear missiles and more from Cuba? Was not the future of the entire world a stake? Would the world have been the same if Kennedy had not succeeded?

Those missiles would have laid unprecedented waste to much of the United States and with ours added would have poisoned the world.

There was a "compromise," as Hersh puts it, that was not really a compromise and it was not last minute or "the real settlement." We were to have been done voluntarily and much earlier, before there was this crisis, and earlier in the crisis. Doing it had been discussed, before Khrushchev raised it, by the "Ex Com" as it was called, the executive committee the President gathered to consider what was really the fate of the world as well as that of the country, as, naturally, Hersh does not say.

There was no hidden "true import" of that crisis and it could not have "remained a state secret" if it had existed as a "state secret." It never did!

All that Hersh says, here and elsewhere, is from his flat-world position, that there is no other dimension, only height and width. No depth, for example. It is by this false pretense, which Little, Brown accepted, that Hersh can write, as he did, about the great success of the peaceful solution of the greatest possible crisis in history that could have nuclearized the world.

Khrushchev as well as Kennedy had to consider what the consequences would be of each thing he did and did not do.

What Hersh is misrepresenting here and making into something wrong and sinister that he says Robert Kennedy had to hide could not be hidden. It was just not reported as part of the settlement. It could not be because more than the United States was involved. Hersh is building up his imagined case of a great defeat for Kennedy in the ultimate removal of those out-of-date Jupiter missiles from Turkey. However, removing them involved not only the United States. Or Turkey, which had to be consulted, and had to agree. It also involved NATO and NATO had to agree. Those were NATO missiles and were there as part of a NATO plan for the defense of all of Europe during the Cold War.

As, of course, Hersh does not say. This is not because he did not know. It is because if he told the truth about this important part of his phony case that is made up out of nothing, it would collapse.

Had those missiles been removed without the required international agreements, the political consequences would have been enormous. It also would have been politically within the United States, especially as the result of the international reaction that was certain from Turkey and NATO if the United States decided and acted for them without consulting them. For which there was no time with the entire Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba within days of complete operation, and with most already operational, as Hersh knew.

But none of which is mentioned by Hersh.

Not a word of it!

Nor does he mention that those Jupiter missiles in Turkey were supposed to have been removed earlier, when there was no crisis, and they had not been, some of our military wanting them there, obsolete and needlessly provocative as they were.

If the United States had decided for and acted for all NATO without NATO and its individual countries deciding for themselves, it would have put NATO and all its other members in an impossible position and it would have been devastating to each of those governments which would have been in a role of subservience to the United States. It could have ruined NATO, as Kennedy feared and said, and it could have gotten some of those governments thrown out.

Hersh also does not ask or go into what could have happened if Khrushchev had not accepted Kennedy's reply that was also an ultimatum which Hersh also does not say.

If what was supposed to have been done voluntarily and earlier had it been done there would not be this opportunity for Hersh to misrepresent it all.

And, as we saw, it could not be kept secret because the other side was party to it and knew and could, and in time did, make it public. Without any reaction in the United States. There was no reaction because there was a different situation, a different context.

Besides which those Jupiters were out of Turkey in six months, with Turkey's and NATO's agreement and there was no reaction at all. It was almost totally ignored here and abroad.

What Hersh made up for money and palmed off as out history and kept secret from him was not all that secret from Vice President Lyndon Johnson, as in what we quote above that Hersh just made up. Hersh said: "The vice president also did not know . . ."

The day before the crisis ended, according to this except from The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow and published by Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), Johnson was informed, approved, and discussed it with Secretary of Defense McNamara:

Johnson:	"Bob, if you're willing to give up the missiles in Turkey, you think you ought to defuse them, why don't you say that to him and say we're cutting a trade, make the trade there, [and] save all the invasion, lives, and everything else?"

McNamara:	"I said I thought it was the realistic solution to the problem."

Johnson:	"Sure. Right. What we were afraid of was he would never offer this, and what he would want to do is trade Berlin."

They all feared that Khrushchev would take some action in Berlin. It was not only Johnson. This is another of the countless considerations missing in the Hersh rewriting of the history he lived through.

Rather than what Hersh made up, Johnson was all for a settlement in which we removed those Jupiter missiles from Turkey. His words are worth repeating. First he agreed with McNamara that it was the "realistic solution to the problem" and then Johnson added, "What we were afraid of was he would never offer this."

But as we quoted Hersh, he said it was kept secret from the Vice President!

Kept so secret from him that he discussed it with the Secretary of Defense and approved it!

In the course of his initial fabrications that are essential to Hersh's making up his phony case of Kennedy as a bad President and the solution to the Cuba missile crisis as a great failure for him and for us, Hersh manages not to report what the Soviets had in Cuba, if Kennedy had ordered an invasion to get it out. Or what nuclear missiles Khrushchev had there if he launched a first strike with them. Some would have, and the advice Kennedy got from his military would have, survived any United States effort to destroy them. On launch, they would have desolated vast parts of this country. Hersh knew. It is not because any of this was secret. When completed, and it was close to complete, what the Soviets had there beside missiles,

. . . was to include some 50,000 Soviet military personnel, organized in five nuclear regiments, four motorized regiments, two tank battalions, one MIG-21 fighter wing, forty-two IL-28 light bombers, two cruise missile attachments, twelve SA-2 anti-aircraft units with 144 launchers, and a squadron of eleven submarines, seven of them equipped with nuclear missiles.

Those cruise missiles were nuclear, as were some of the limited-range-battlefield units.

"By September there were thirty-six SS-4 medium range missiles (MRBM) and twenty- four intermediate-range (IRBM) missiles, with nuclear warheads." (Quoted from On The Brink, by Tony Judt (right), in The New York Review of Books for January 15, 1998. "By October 28, when the crisis ended, all the warheads for both sorts of missiles and all the SS-4 missiles themselves were actually in Cuba — only the five SS-5s remained to be delivered."

(In this lengthy article Judt reviews three major books the contents of most of which were readily accessible to Hersh if he had been interested in the information. Those books are, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964, by Aleksander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Norton,; The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, Belknap/Harvard University Press; and The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Jupiters 1957-63, by Philip Nash, University of North Carolina Press.)

Dishonest in intent from his first pages, Hersh could not begin his assault on Kennedy as a bad President as a failure and as a coward in the Cuba missile crisis, while simultaneously telling his readers what Soviet arms in Cuba we and the world would have faced if Kennedy had not gotten Khrushchev to remove them.

This is how Hersh begins his assault on the Kennedy Presidency, along with some of the truth he knew and withheld to make his phony, his dishonest case.

We do not take the time or the space to go into all of his similar efforts in his later chapters but we do address the most important parts.