Chapter 14

The Pulitzer Prize Reporter And Some of What He Suppresses

The thrust of Hersh's book is that Kennedy, a bad man, was a bad President and that his was a failed Presidency about which the people were deceived by his and brother Robert's lies and by their skilled public relations. This was also the thrust of much of Hersh's promotional work in interviews and appearances. That it was Hersh's preconceived intent is clear in the book and is inherent in the unoriginal title. "The Dark Side of Camelot" is what Hersh wants the people and history to believe represents the real President Kennedy and the real Kennedy Presidency, as it does not.

Hersh does refer to both Kennedys as liars. That is enough to justify referring to him that way. The difference is, as we see herein, is that it is appropriate to the Hersh of this book as it is not to the Kennedy Presidency.

At the very beginning, amidst all Hersh's conjectures about what was in the President's files that Hersh says Robert had to get destroyed, what we saw Hersh not only knew nothing about but was wrong in what he made up about them; in the midst of Hersh's fabrications about Kennedy being responsible for and behind the CIA's assassinations, failed and successful, which we also saw was false, a lie; Hersh begins another of his endless lies in a passage we addressed earlier for a different reason. Here he uses it to argue that the widely-respected and admired solution to the Cuba missile crisis was a Kennedy defeat. About this, on his third numbered page, Hersh says what he tries to argue throughout, particularly in his "Missile Crisis" chapter (pages 341-71):

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 is 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.

That Johnson did not know, as we saw, was another of the endless Hersh lies made up for his argument. We saw that Johnson not only did know, was involved in the discussions of that part of the solution to that crisis, he was all for it. In Hersh-it history this comes out that Johnson "did not know" that "acclaimed triumph . . . was far from a victory." No historian I've seen quoted, no article I've seen by any accredited historian, and almost none by any reputable journalist agrees with this fiction of Hersh's fabrication so he could have his book.

As we saw earlier in his article in the November 17, 1997 Time, Columbia University History Professor Alan Brinkley expressed an exceptionally low opinion of what Hersh wrote. After saying that much of what Hersh has in the book is rehash and the rest is "poorly sourced," Brinkley said:

But he also offers a larger justification for returning to sordid and oft-trod ground: "Kennedy's life and personal obsessions — his character— affected the affairs of the nation and its foreign policy far more than has ever been known." Hersh's book fails most conspicuously on that point.

Historian Herbert S. Parmet, used as an authority by Hersh in his book, wrote of it in a December 17, 1997 article Newsday syndicated under the title, "History, Not Sy Hersh, Is Kinder to JFK," that "The Dark Side of Camelot' does a disservice to history and his leaps into the mud are not the only basis for the anguish'."

Parmet is one of those who had written a biography of the President and based on his knowledge is critical of Hersh and what he wrote.

There are others. We come to some of them.

Pressed just a little, really very little on this by the Toronto Star's Lynda Hurst whose December 7 report on her Hersh interview we quoted earlier, Hersh actually admitted the opposite, that with a single exception the Kennedy solution to the missile crisis was a great success. Before she could follow up on this Hersh admission he changed the subject, rapidly, instantly, to what we have seen is a persisting Hersh lie, that Kennedy was behind the CIA's failed efforts to assassinate Castro. Hurst preceded a series of items with the subhead "Examples" saying of them that with Hersh "its like darting back and forth through the looking glass because what Hersh says in the book and what he seems to be saying at breakneck sped, in person, are sometimes different things." Then:

Example : In the book, Hersh is scathing about how Jack and his attorney-general brother, Robert, were totally to blame for triggering the Cuban missile crisis in October, 1964 with their crazed, if ever-futile fixation with offing Castro.

He is critical of the little-known fact that, in the end, Kennedy secretly traded off American missile bases in Turkey in exchange for Russia's pulling its out of Cuba. And he's scornful of the JFK-as-macho-hero propaganda spun out during the crisis best exemplified by secretary of state Dean Rusk's famous line "We're eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked."

"The Kennedy brothers," Hersh writes contemptuously, "brought the world to the edge of war in their attempts to turn the dispute into a political asset."

But when it's suggested that Kennedy's handing of the crisis was calm, cool and masterful — as confirmed in newly released White House tapes — and that trading off the Turkish sites made strategic sense, Hersh is, inexplicably, quick to agree.

"It was a great response," he nods.

"But you wrote . . . "

"The only thing that's negative is that he lied about it," he quickly adds "Kennedy knew what he'd done against Castro, Castro knew, (Nikita) Khrushchev knew. Only the American people didn't know."

Example: It's known that the plan to eliminate Castro existed before Kennedy was elected. Wasn't he just part of a continuum of, well, evil in the White House?

"Yes, it was a continuum," he agrees.

"But you . . ."

"But Kennedy didn't just buy into it! He took what had been there and made it different. Excuuuse me, but I don't deny (former president Dwight) Eisenhower's role in this. I don't take a moral pass on him."

With this of several "examples" Hurst's reference to Alice in Wonderland is not inappropriate. Up is down with Hersh, and in is out with him.

For Hersh to acknowledge that Kennedy's handling of that missile crisis was "calm, cool and masterful" and that the solution, including what he was so particularly critical of, "trading off those Turkish missile sites, made strategic sense" and was "a great response," could hardly be more apposed to what Hersh says of this in his book and on which his criticism of the Kennedy Presidency is largely based.

Before his quick switch to what we have seen is not true about Castro this is what Hersh admitted.

Hersh's explanation in Hurst's next "example" is, as we have seen, false. Kennedy had nothing to do with the CIA's attempts to assassinate Castro. He did not even know about them.

Fact is the one thing Hurst could not get from Hersh, or a factual response:

If you query, as ex-aide Schlesinger has done, Hersh's constant, er, assumption that every time Kennedy said, "We've got to get rid of" someone, he was in fact ordering the killing of that someone, Hersh will flare up like John McEnroe at centre court.

"Are you seriously suggesting that Kennedy never knew or authorized assassinations? Gimme a break."

Hersh's proof that Kennedy was behind assassinations is to ask "Are you seriously suggesting that Kennedy never knew or authorized assassinations?" which is in fact, what the records established, and he adds the plea, "Gimme a break," which Hurst had in italics, to reflect Hersh's emphasis.

The outrageous, the consummate indecency, the incredible statement Hersh made about his belief, that Hurst saved for the last words of her lengthy article. They are, even after deep immersion in Hersh, really beyond belief. The Schlesinger referred to is Arthur, Jr., both a Pulitzer historian and a former member of the Kennedy White House staff:

Hersh denies Schlesinger's charge that his capacity for "exaggeration is unparalleled." And he denies that he constantly puts the worst, the darkest possible, interpretation on events and conversations. The worst, he says, is simply what he found.

"Just consider, maybe it is that bad. Maybe it's possible that it is that bad. Maybe it just is. I'm sorry if it drives a lot of people crazy."

He isn't sorry, at all. Not one little bit. Despite the flak he's taken from former colleagues for using what they consider suspect or third-hand sources; despite the loss of a friend of 30 years who will no longer speak to him. The book, he grins, is already Number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list a second printing is under way. Need he say more?

Well, yes.

"There's been a lot of lousy, awful history written about Jack Kennedy, and it's absolutely my right to reclaim that history."

And no, lest anyone is wondering, "I had no animus against Jack Kennedy when I began this book. I knew about his lying, but I wept at his death. I wouldn't bleed now, not knowing what I know . . . It was rough justice."

"Rough justice" in Kennedy's death?

Hersh is saying that Kennedy deserved to die, to be assassinated!

His admission of that, he believes Kennedy deserved assassination, which may have just slipped out when he was asked embarrassing questions by a competent journalist, can explain much about his book that is not easily explained for a professional with Hersh's credentials.

It is not easy to explain why a professional like Hersh has no real end notes, no real source notes, no bibliography; why he lies so persistently, knowing that he lies; why he overlooks what he knows and does omit; why he lets a little proof of his dishonesty slip in from time to time; why he could depend so often so exclusively on sources he knew had their own involvements, particularly of the CIA, like his favored Halperns and Harveys with their own pasts and involvement to cover up; and the prejudice that almost oozes from the pages.

Hersh hates Kennedy and was determined to justify his hatred and to the degree possible for him, ruin Kennedy's reputation as President.

Having written about it as a dismal, a terrible failure, Hersh begins his "Missile Crisis" chapter, as he spoke to Hurst, denying himself, saying that "John Kennedy's greatest triumph as President came in the missile crisis of October 1962" (page 341).

In giving an idea of the magnitude of what, without the peaceful solution could have followed (but not having that in mind), Hersh says — and it is build-up for his saying the opposite — "The president's determination and his show of force seemingly won the day." That "seemingly" is in there to hint that what is without question true is not true at all, as with what follows Hersh undertakes to argue. That word, "argue," used by Shribman in his Wall Street Journal review of the Hersh book, is correct. Rather than write the history, Hersh told Hurst, as quoted above, that "it's absolutely my right to reclaim," Hersh argues, wanting his argument to be accepted as what it is not, as fact, as proof, as evidence. And then he gets into that imaginary "deceit" of his:

At the height of the crisis, Kennedy mobilized a vast army or men and materiel that stood poised to attack Cuba and perhaps trigger a nuclear holocaust. The invasion plan called for the largest drop of paratroopers since the battle for Normandy in 1944; the Pentagon estimated that 18,500 Americans would be killed or wounded in the first ten days of battle. The Strategic Air Command's fleet of 1,436 B-52 and B-47 bombers and 172 intercontinental ballistic missiles was moved to DEFCON 2, the highest military alert short of all-out war. One-eighth of the bombers were in the air at all times during the next thirty days prepared to drop devastating nuclear weapons on targets in Cuba and the Soviet Union. The 579 fighters of the air force's Tactical Air Command were programmed to fly 1,190 combat sorties in the invasion's first twenty-four hours; aviation fuel and other essential supplies were positioned throughout southern Florida and on a British base in the Bahamas. More than 100,000 combat-ready army infantrymen had deployed to ports along the East Coast, a few hours from Cuba. A huge navy fleet, backed up by 40,000 marines, was steaming, moments away from battle stations, through international waters in the Caribbean and the South America. The American war machine was at its "highest state of readiness," according to military documents made public years later, and awaited only a go signal from the White House. The president's determination, and his show of force, seemingly won the day.

Kennedy earned plaudits and admiration not only for his clear triumph but for his cool style and confident demeanor between the discovery of medium-range missiles on Cuba on October 15 and Khrushchev's public capitulation on October 28. "It was this combination of toughness and restraint," Arthur Schlesinger wrote in A Thousand Days, "of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world . . . The thirteen days gave the world — even the Soviet Union — a sense of American determination and responsibility in the use of power which, if sustained, might indeed become a turning point in the history of the relations between east and west."

Over the next thirty-five years a vast assortment of evidence including published memoirs interviews, and documents released from Soviet archives — has revealed that much of what the Kennedy administration said about the crisis at the time, publicly and privately, was not true. The overriding deceit — one that still distorts the history of those thirteen days — was the absolute determination of Jack and Bobby Kennedy to conceal their campaign to assassinate Fidel Castro and destroy his regime. The American public was not told what the KGB and Nikita Khrushchev knew (pages 341-2).

With a nuclear holocaust possible, with so many American casualties at the very beginning of any war in Cuba the Pentagon estimate, with who can imagine what was certain to follow, all of this is missing when Hersh argues about the solution without reference to the possibilities if there had been no such peaceful solution.

As is inevitable, Hersh slips in his determined lie at the end of what is quoted, the nonexisting, the proven false "absolute determination of Jack and Bobby Kennedy to assassinate Fidel Castro and destroy is regime."

That abundantly proven lie, "assassinate," typifies Hersh-it Journalism.

While there is no doubt that for most of his Presidency Kennedy wanted the Castro regime thrown out by one to United States liking, there came a time when that changed, as we saw, when Kennedy was seeking an accommodation with Castro, as we also saw above. Unofficially Kennedy sought to use the respected French correspondent, Jean Daniel. If Daniel were mentioned in Hersh's book his name would be indexed on page 481.

It is not there.

One of Kennedy's then ambassadors at the UN and the one who was to do the negotiating for Kennedy was William Attwood.

His name is not indexed on page 477, where it would be if he were mentioned in the book.

ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard was the intermediary who got it all started. Hersh does not mention her, according to his index, page 485.

Castro's ambassador at the UN with whom Attwood had met and was to meet again was Carlos Lechuga. His name is not in the index, where it would be if he were mentioned, on page 490.

We have seen Attwood's Senate testimony. Lechuga wrote a book about it, In the Eye of the Storm. The English edition was published by Ocean Press, Melbourne, Australia, in 1995. (It was distributed in the United States, Britain, Europe and elsewhere and was available to Hersh, who does not mention it.)

This is but one of innumerable instances of what is referred to above as omissions of what an honest, responsible writer intending an honest responsible book would not have omitted.

But if Hersh had not omitted it he could not have said that the Kennedys had that "absolute determination" to "assassinate Castro and destroy his regime" which Kennedy was, without question, preparing to try to find a way to get along with, as the Attwood testimony alone proves.

Of course Attwood and Jean Daniel, both writers, wrote about this, about their involvements and efforts and that writing was well known. Other than for Hersh's book.

Attwood's testimony was before one of Hersh's oft-used sources, the Senate's Church committee, so Hersh should have known about it from that source, too.

But not from Hersh's book can this be perceived.

Hersh wanted his falsehoods only before his readers, his falsehoods only in that "history" he told Hurst he was going to "reclaim" and that it was "absolutely his right" to do.

As Hersh continued to argue, there being nothing else he could do and have his book, Little, Brown and its editors were, as throughout, quite tolerant. Take, for example, the first sentence of the several quoted Hersh paragraphs that follow:

But Kennedy remained obsessed with Cuba, and so it became Khrushchev's turn to be humiliated. Over the next thirteen days, the president eschewed diplomacy and played a terrifying game of nuclear chicken, without knowing all of the facts. For the first time in his presidency Kennedy publicly brought his personal recklessness and his belief that the normal rules of conduct did not apply to him, to his foreign policy. On October 27, at the height of the crisis, when the downing of an American spy plane threatened to move events beyond his control, Kennedy was forced to seek a compromise and to rely on Khrushchev's common sense and dread of nuclear war to keep the superpowers apart. Once again, at a moment of high risk the president turned to Bobby Kennedy his protector, to bail him out. Jack Kennedy's deceits about his personal life and the corruption of the 1960 presidential election pale beside the false legacy he and his brother manufactured in the days and weeks after the missile crisis. Kennedy brought the world to the edge of nuclear war to gain a political victory: to humble an adversary who humbled him before. But the public would be told, and would believe that the valiant young president had won the missile crisis, by negotiating from strength. The lessons seemingly learned in the missile crisis would haunt American policymakers during the peace negotiations with North Vietnam, and would have made it more difficult for presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to accept a compromise had they chosen to do so, thus perpetuating a war that claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and millions of Asians.

This, then, is a new history of the missile crisis, centered on the two most powerful men in Washington in the fall of 1962, the two men who knew all the secrets (page 345).

If it can fairly be said that the solution "humiliated" Khrushchev, who did accomplish his known and his stated objectives and who remained in power as long as there was a dovish United States President and for quite some time after that, it can not be said that the "humiliation" was because "Kennedy remained obsessed with Cuba."

Who can believe that the determination of any United States President to get out of Cuba all those Soviet missiles with their nuclear warheads and so much more that could be used against the United States was only because "it was Khrushchev's turn to be humiliated"?

This is another Hershian fiction of typical Hersh-it journalism.

As it also is that with all those nuclear missiles there and more being made operative every day that there was time for whatever Hersh has in mind by — and he is careful not to say or even indicate what it is — by "diplomacy."

It is not like going into a candy store and deciding between chocolates and licorice. There was much that had to be thought through and with the greatest of care. All the alternatives, of which none exist in Hersh's five hundred pages, had to be examined, all the possibilities, all the consequences that could follow. Plans had to be and were made.

Then, too, preparations had to be made for what could happen, and, although it is not a factor in Hersh's argument or worth any space in his book, they were very, very serious and they also took time.

This allegation, that Kennedy acted as though "the normal rules of conduct did not apply to him" and with "personal recklessness" is stupid, ignorant, false and it is deliberately all these things. It is Hersh being Hersh.

What Kennedy did is what the responsible head of every state would have done, faced with such a potential disaster, such a threat. First he had to learn all that he could about it. He had to consult and for that gather together those with whom he would consult so they could consult among themselves. They all had to think, to plan, to prepare, and that they did, not intending to give the lie to himself, we quote above from Hersh, in this chapter of his, the preparations were made if war came.

Meanwhile, Kennedy steered the course that avoided war, as Hersh admitted to Hurst in Toronto and lies about in his book in the United States.

As Hersh does not have to say, having the tolerance of Little, Brown for anything and everything he would say, no diplomacy could possibly have been as fast as the time between announcement of the discovery of the missiles in Cuba and the announcement of, and how Hersh hates to mention this, such being his love of those Jupiters in Turkey, the United States guarantee of Cuba against invasion and the withdrawal of these Soviet missiles, bombers and more.

In thirteen days from the beginning to end, and that is faster than any negotiations by diplomats.

The photos of the missiles in Cuba were taken October 14. After all the plans, preparations, discussions, after all that had to be done as the minimum was done to prepare for it, on the night of the twenty-second the President announced what he called the "quarantine" to get around the fact that a blockade is an act of war.

On the twenty-fourth the blockade line was drawn. The next day the first Soviet ship reached it. It carried no war materials and was allowed to proceed. That morning it was clear that many Soviet ships had turned back.

On Friday, October 26 Kennedy received Khrushchev's letter saying he would withdraw those weapons from Cuba if the United States would not invade Cuba.

When Kennedy did not accept that immediately, the next day Khrushchev then made his demand that those Jupiters be removed from his border, from Turkey.

And on the twenty-eighth if was all over.

Quite aside from the unprecedented nature of what was involved and the unprecedented nature of its potential, from the time the United States had worked its position out and made all the preparations it had to make until the end of that crisis was a week.

There is no diplomacy that fast.

And as Hersh does not mention, there was never any need for as much as speed, never in history. More missiles were being readied in Cuba.

There was no "nuclear chicken" being played, as Hersh says and pretends. There was never anything as serious in the history of the world and it was not game of chicken. It was of saving the world.

The downing of that U-2 over Cuba had nothing to do with the settlement.

Kennedy did not take "the world to the edge of nuclear war to gain a political victory" or to "humble an adversary." Kennedy had the situation, the policy he had inherited from the Eisenhower administration and, as a practical matter, there was not a thing he could do about it. That policy, what Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower, is what caused Khrushchev to agree to meet his obligation to protect Cuba and he used the only means possible for him.

What Hersh has written is not "a new history of the missile." It is a fairy tale. There is no truth in it. Hersh-it journalism at its worse.

After more of what is no better than propaganda Hersh gets to those missiles in Turkey that he has made so big a thing of, as it being a big defeat for Kennedy when Kennedy agreed to withdraw them but without publicity, as indicated earlier.

Hersh knew they were not of any military significance. He quotes the head of the CIA and the Secretary of Defense on this:

In his opinion, McCone said, according to a CIA summary declassified in 1996, there was a probability that medium-range ballistic missiles would be the next step in the Soviet buildup. McCone's memorandum of the meeting, published in 1992 by the CIA, showed that Kennedy specifically raised the question "of what we could do against Soviet missile sites in Cuba." The linkage between the Jupiter missiles Turkey and the Soviet missiles was also discussed, according to the memorandum: "McCone questioned value of Jupiter missiles. . . . McNamara agreed they were useless but difficult politically to remove them." McCone coupled his aggressive intelligence reporting with aggressive recommendations for an immediate American invasion of Cuba in sufficient force "to occupy the country, destroy the regime, free the people, and establish in Cuba a peaceful country" (pages 318-9).

On this basis alone, and it is not alone, how could there be that big a defeat for Kennedy in his removing those missiles from Turkey with no announcement of it? The head of the CIA "questioned" the "value" of those missiles and the Secretary of Defense "agreed that they were useless." So, removing what is "useless" is a big Kennedy defeat, as Hersh writes his "absolute" history.

(There was no "diplomacy" in the McCone "recommendation for an immediate invasion of Cuba, "which certainly risked a major and a nuclear war.)

Hersh gets back to those Jupiters when he writes about the Khrushchev demand that they be removed. What Hersh, who claims taking them out was so big a defeat for Kennedy, actually says is:

The American Jupiters in Turkey were known to be strategically insignificant and vulnerable to Soviet attack, and Khrushchev's offer put the president in a dilemma. "He obviously did not wish to order the withdrawal of the missiles from Turkey under threat from the Soviet Union, Bobby Kennedy explained in Thirteen Days. "On one other hand, he did not want to involve the U.S. and mankind in a catastrophic war over missiles in Turkey that were antiquated and useless" (page 363).

The more Hersh says about what he characterizes as Kennedy's big defeat and had other nasty cracks to make about, the more obvious it becomes that Hersh knew better. It is also obvious that once again he knew more and once again suppressed it, not quite as polite as saying he omitted it.

Hersh knew that those missiles had been and were be removed, that long before any missile crisis Kennedy had ordered it and, on learning that it had not been done, ordered again that it be done. One source he definitely had he refers to in a lengthy note on page 374. It is the book The Missile Crisis by Elie Abel, then an NBC News Washington correspondent and later head of the Columbia School of Journalism. The book was published in 1966 by J. B. Lippincott.

Abel is writing about that second Khrushchev demand, received that Saturday morning. The Thompson he refers to, some of that diplomacy Hersh claims Kennedy had nothing to do with, was one of the diplomats with whom, in addition to the State Department, he remained in contact and consultation and who were in the Ex Comm. Llewellyn Thompson had been our ambassador to the USSR. He was a Republican:

On the surface, the idea had a glittering symmetry. Thompson warned that the Russians would certainly interpret the President's acceptance as proof of weakness in Washington. Dean Rusk suggested that Turkey should reject the Soviet demand, although it had been addressed to Kennedy. Let the Turks declare, Rusk said, that they are members of the North Atlantic alliance, that the Jupiters are part of NATO's defenses, and that the current threat to peace is half a world away — in Cuba, not in Turkey. There was general agreement that no matter how little the Turkish missiles might be worth, in the military sense, to trade them off now would be to undermine the faith of the whole alliance in America's pledged word.

The President was trying hard an this time to suppress an inner rage. He distinctly remembered having given instructions, long before the Cuba missiles crisis, that the Jupiters must be removed from Turkey. Now he was confronted with one of two cruel choices: to shake, perhaps to shatter, the Western Alliance by trading off Turkey's missile defenses for the sake of United States security, or to risk thermonuclear war over some nearly obsolete missiles the United States had long since written off as militarily worthless.

The Russians could not have known that soon after his Inauguration January 1961, the President himself had raised the question at a National Security Council meeting. A big push was on at the Pentagon to replace first-generation missiles like Thor and Jupiter with Minuteman and Polaris by way of building what the military theoreticians called a "second-strike capacity." The Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy had just recommended the removal of all Jupiters from Italy as well as Turkey. The Committee held that they were unreliable, inaccurate, obsolete and too easily sabotaged. What do we gain by leaving them there? the President had asked. Why be provocative?

The 1961 Berlin crisis had intervened. Kennedy and his policy planners found themselves preoccupied with other; seemingly more urgent problems. Then, in the late winter and early spring of 1962, an Administration study confirmed the Congressional Committee's findings, "Those Turkish missiles aren't worth much," the President had said to Adlai Stevenson. "What the Turks want and need is the American payrolls those bases represent." Dean Rusk was assigned to sound out the Turkish and Italian foreign ministers during the NATO meeting at Oslo in May 1962. Paul Nitze went with him, representing the Defense Department. The Turkish Foreign Minister, Selim Sarper, told Rusk and Nitze the Jupiters were an indispensable token of America's commitment to defend its allies. Too few Polaris submarines had been commissioned at the time to permit stationing them in the Mediterranean as replacements for the Jupiters. So the matter was dropped, temporarily.

Late that summer the President inquired again about the Turkish Jupiter bases. Rusk was in Europe. In his absence George Ball reported that the State Department felt it would be unwise to press the matter further. The President disagreed. He then and there directed that the missiles must be removed, even at some political cost to the United States. Ball and Nitze talked it over with the Turkish Ambassador in Washington and once more the reaction was negative. The Ambassador warned that removal of the missiles would have a most harmful effect on public opinion in Turkey. Nothing happened. Though the President apparently, dismissed the Jupiters from his mind, assuming that they were about to be removed, as ordered.

It was, therefore, with a doubled sense of shock that Kennedy heard the news that Saturday morning. Not only were the missiles still in Turkey but they had just become pawns in a deadly chess game. Kennedy reflected sadly on the built-in futilities of big government, and, in the struggle to control his emotions, left the room. Ken O'Donnell knew the President sometimes vented his irritations through physical movement. He followed him out to the terrace and they walked back and forth, talking together. A few minutes afterward, O'Donnell telephoned Bromley Smith, McGeorge Bundy's deputy in charge of National Security Council matters. "The President wants to know, O'Donnell said, "when he first asked for this thing." After quickly checking the file of National Security Council action memoranda, Smith was able to confirm the President's recollection. Kennedy had, indeed, issued instructions for removal of the Jupiters in the third week of August 1962, two months before the crisis.

The President recognized that it was too late now for lamentations over what might have been. He sensed at once that the Turkish missiles were a side issue. If, in the end, he had to order an armed attack on Cuba, leading perhaps to general war, it would not be because the United States five years before had stationed Jupiter missiles in Turkey (pages 189-91).

What Abel wrote is clear enough. Kennedy had repeatedly ordered those Jupiters out of Turkey, the most recent time was two months before the crisis, and his orders had not been followed.

Hersh knew this from Abel's book and still wrote what he did about those missiles and about them being a big defeat for the Kennedys who were, as Hersh put it, so "deceitful" about them.

The truth being well known and being omitted for an experienced reporter is a deliberate suppression of it. But if Hersh had not suppressed it, he could not have inveighed against the Kennedy's as he did.

We come to some of that shortly.

As Hersh says without spelling it out, without saying so as he loves to do when he can smear a Kennedy, his own book makes the case that had Eisenhower been President there would have been the war Kennedy prevented. He refers to Kennedy conferring with Eisenhower. Kennedy is speaking:

. . . "Khrushchev will make a statement that any attack upon Cuba will be regarded as an attack upon the Soviet Union. We have to assume," Kennedy added, "that as this surveillance continues with the U-2s, these SAM sites may shoot one down." He and his advisers were considering what steps to take if that did happen, Kennedy added. "I don't know, we may get into the invasion business before many days are out but we just have to."

Eisenhower was approving of the tough talk, and the two men then casually discussed the possibility of all-out nuclear war.

Eisenhower: "Of course, from a military standpoint, [invading Cuba is] a clean-cut thing to do now.

Kennedy: "That's right."

Eisenhower: "Because you've made up your mind you've got to get rid of this thing. The only real way to get rid of it, of course, is the other thing. But having to be concerned with world opinion . . ."

Kennedy: "And Berlin . . . I suppose that may be what they're going to try to trade off."

Eisenhower: "My idea is this: the damn Soviets will do whatever they want, what they figure is good for them. . . . I could be all wrong, but my own conviction is that you will not find a great deal of relationship between these things [Cuba and Berlin]. . . ."

Kennedy: "General, what if Khrushchev announced tomorrow, which I think he will, that if we attack Cuba, it's going to be nuclear war! What's your judgment as to the chances they'll fire these things off if we invade Cuba?"

Eisenhower: "Oh, I don't believe they will."

Kennedy: "in other words, you would take that risk if the situation seems desirable?"

Eisenhower: "What can you do? If this thing is such a serious thing here on our flank . . . you've got to use something. Something may make these people [the Soviets] shoot them off. I just don't believe this will. . . . I'll say this: I'd want to keep my own people very alert."

Eisenhower and Kennedy shared a laugh at that point.

Kennedy: "Well, hang on tight" (page 357).

No "diplomacy" from Eisenhower when he tells Kennedy that "from a military standpoint [invading Cuba] is a clean cut thing to do now." Eisenhower also said that was "the only real way to ger rid" of that "problem."

Eisenhower did tell Kennedy he had to risk nuclear war.

When Hersh gets after the Kennedy's again he writes that Robert has gone to see the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin for a last-minute meeting and

with Dobrynin and made a secret arrangement to give Nikita Khrushchev the trade he wanted — Jupiter missiles removed from Turkey in exchange for withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba (page 365).

For anyone knowing enough about this subject to write about it saying that the deal was "Jupiter missiles removed from Turkey in exchange for withdrawing the Soviet missiles from Cuba" is to lie with a deliberate purpose — the purpose being to exaggerate as part of his assault on Kennedy the importance of removing these "useless" missiles from Turkey. What Khrushchev put those missiles and other military equipment in Cuba for was because there was the possibility if not the probability for a United States invasion of Cuba under Operation Mongoose, that additional failure of those Hersh loves so much, the CIA. Khrushchev got the United States assurance that there would be no invasion, which was what Khrushchev was after all along and he got, although Hersh, knowing this, suppresses that, too. Hersh then quotes Dobrynin:

Dobrynin's secret cable to Moscow about the meeting, published with little fanfare in 1995 by the Cold War International History Project Bulletin reported that Kennedy arrived with a compromise offer as well as a warning: time was of the essence, because, Kennedy said, "there are many unreasonable heads among the [American] generals, and not only among the generals, who are 'itching' for a fight. The situation might get out of control with irreversible consequences." His brother Robert Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador, was under "strong pressure" to permit the air force to retaliate against Cuban targets if American reconnaissance planes were fired upon. "The USA can't stop these flights," Kennedy said, "because this is the only way we can quickly get information about the state of construction of the missile bases in Cuba." If the American bombing took place, the president's brother said, the result could be nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. "In response to the bombing of these bases," Dobrynin quoted the distraught Kennedy as saying, "the Soviet government will undoubtedly respond with the same against us, somewhere in Europe. A real war will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die. We want to avoid that any way we can (page 365).

The literature available to Hersh and of which he knows reports the open insubordination of some of the top military and other comments by them not inconsistent with what Dobrynin attributes to Robert Kennedy. Continuing:

"During our meeting," Dobrynin wrote in his cable home, "R. Kennedy was very upset; in any case, I've never seen him like this before. . . . He didn't even try to get into fights on various subjects, as he usually does and only persistently returned to one topic time is of the essence and we shouldn't miss the chance."

The brothers had lost control because of the downing of one American spy plane. What began as payback for the Bay of Pigs was beginning to evolve into a world war. The Kennedys, fanatical about being tough and resolute in front of their peers, could not turn to the government they controlled to extricate themselves from disaster. They turned for help, instead, to Nikita Khrushchev.

With a missile trade on the table, Bobby Kennedy asked Dobrynin and Khrushchev for secret explaining that only two or three people in Washington were aware of the behind-the-scenes bargaining. "The president can't say anything public in this regard," Kennedy added. The missiles in Turkey were nominally under NATO command, and to order their removal unilaterally "would seriously tear apart NATO. However," Dobrynin's cable quoted Kennedy as saying, "President Kennedy is ready to come to agreement on that question with N.S. Khrushchev, too. I think that in order to withdraw these bases from Turkey, we need four — five months" If Khrushchev agreed, Kennedy added, he and the president could continue to work together with Dobrynin serving as the middleman in a new back channel (page 366).

Hersh does not here recall all those others he has quotes saying essentially what Robert Kennedy did about the political impossibility of removing those missiles with a public announcement of it.

But it did happen as Robert said it would and there was peace.

Peace is one thing no Kennedy, even dead, can expect from Hersh. He says:

The Kennedy brothers brought the world to the edge of war in their attempts to turn the dispute into a political asset. They survived by making private entreaties to a Soviet premier they had sought only days earlier to humiliate before the world. Jack Kennedy was willing to trust the Soviet leadership with information that, if made public would destroy his presidency. Robert Kennedy was also willing to hold his future presidency hostage to the vagaries of a foreign government that could choose at any time, to make public the terms of the missile trade (page 369).

That "information" was made public when those missiles were removed and their removal was publicly ignored. It did not "destroy" the Kennedy Presidency. As Hersh knew in writing three decades later.

Hersh does not explain how "The Kennedy brothers brought the world to the edge of war" or how that was or could have been "in their attempt to turn the dispute into a political asset." The reason he does not explain it is that he cannot because neither part is true. Kennedy faced nuclear missiles in Cuba and much more, they were a menace to the United States, at least, and he got them out without a shot being fired. He did not take the world to the edge of war. He faced that threat of war, though, and kept the world at peace.

What Hersh means by their "political asset" he also does not explain. It is obvious that had Kennedy made a public announcement during that crisis of the removal of these "useless" missiles in Turkey there would have been, as he said , a new wave of McCarthyism over it. So avoiding that was to his political advantage, as it was for that to the country.

There may have been in Hersh's mind what Gore Vidal referred to in his December 1, 1997 New Yorker article referred to earlier. Vidal has always been knee-jerk anti-Kennedy, as that article is. But politely in it he calls Hersh a liar:

Finally, a correction for Hersh and his readers: He writes, There was some talk inside the family of having a Kennedy-Kennedy ticket in 1964" — Robert to replace Lyndon as Vice-President — "most of it, Gore Vidal told me in an interview, coming from Ethel Kennedy, Bobby's wife." Actually, it was Hersh who told me this story last year (page 92).

Is there another reason Hersh has no source notes?

Could there have been much of this? To whom Hersh attributes what they did not say or that he did?

Aside from those of whom are quoted earlier condemning Hersh, like Sidey, who used the word "evil."

Hersh-it journalism is what it is!