Chapter 15

"Fortunate . . . Kennedy Was The President Charged With Managing The Crisis"

There is nothing Hersh did not twist into one of his anti-Kennedy formulations. If he can do this no other way he adds a bit to what was real or true. Not even his relatively rare footnotes escape this Hersh-it treatment. One page on which this is particularly true, page 351, has two footnotes, a rarity, and both are written to be anti-Kennedy. They are, in fact, included for that purpose. The first of these is Hershed-in for his making cracks about Robert Kennedy. In the course of doing that, however, Hersh discloses that he has read a book about which he makes no other mention. It is by Dino S. Brugioni, who then was one of the originals on the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center. Hersh takes from that book what he can use for making Robert Kennedy look bad. In doing this, however, he discloses that he has and had read the book and is therefore familiar with what I holds other than what he can use to make his crack about Robert, which was all Hersh cared about. Hersh says correctly that the book's title, Eyeball to Eyeball, was taken from Dean Rusk's statement that when we were eyeball to eyeball, the Soviets blinked. Hersh does not give that 1991 book's subtitle. It is, The Inside History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. To be able to publish his book, Brugioni had to have the CIA's approval and its approval of the book's contents. His CIA employment contract required that. Beside, the CIA sued those who published without its approval and won those lawsuits, taking the entire gross from some of those books.

But Brugioni intends no criticism of the CIA he served so loyally.

With Hersh's book largely about that missile crisis, or at least about what he wants to say about it and about the Kennedy's in it, there is in it no other mention or use of the CIA-approved book that has so much on what supposedly Hersh is writing about, The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This, it is safe to assume, is not because it supports what Hersh wants believed as he undertakes to rewrite history.

There is another importance of the Brugioni book that Hersh does not indicate. It is a unique, an inside source on the CIA and the dependence that can be placed on what it does and says, including its vaunted, its fabled directors.

It happens that I wrote about that several years ago. Soon we have some of what I wrote when it was not known that Hersh was exercising his "absolute" right to rewrite our history. It should be informative to those who have taken Hersh's uses of those who had been involved in the matters of which Hersh writes when working for the CIA as dependable, as unquestionable, the way Hersh presents them.

What Hersh did not use of Brugioni's book is what writers, those with a reporting background in particular, usually like very much, what they can present as an "untold story." This is true, of course, of those who do not have what to them is reasonable cause not to want that untold story to be told. As, obviously Hersh does not want us to consider.

When we get to part of what I wrote several years ago readers can decide for themselves if that untold story is one that Hersh, who makes such extensive and unquestioning uses of the CIA and its people, would prefer not be told.

Hersh has his Brugioni and another footnote in his "Missile Crisis" chapter, where he is giving free play to his hatred of the Kennedys:

Kennedy's first move was to organize the Ex Comm (for Executive Committee of the National Security Council), staff it with insiders and outsiders, and insist that its deliberations remain totally secret. He gave the Ex Comm members one goal: the Soviet missiles in Cuba had to go, either by a blockade of Soviet shipping or something more drastic. In one move, Kennedy isolated those men who could lead a public charge against his stewardship of state and left them to debate in private, while he and his brother struggled to reap political gain from a mess that had been triggered by their obsession with Cuba. The Ex Comm members, who included cabinet secretaries and establishment figures such as Dean Acheson, the hardline former Secretary of State, and Robert A. Lovett, the New York lawyer and financier, were kept busy plotting air strikes and planning invasions.* But the real decision-making was done elsewhere.† The American public would not be informed of the missile crisis until the president decided to inform them six days hence; until then, barring a leak, the Soviet Union would also not know that its missiles had been discovered. Jack Kennedy had time to consider, in secret conversations with his brother, the next step (pages 351-2).

Hersh can't say "beans" without giving that an anti-Kennedy twist and making up an anti- Kennedy meaning to go with it.

For the moment we do no more than record having that the longer of these two footnotes established that Hersh was familiar with the Brugioni inside-story of the crisis that supposedly Hersh is writing about an uses not a word of that inside story. We use Hersh's second footnote because it reflects other knowledge he had and other information he knew was available to him and he elected not to use. The anti-Kennedy opinion Hersh offers can be evaluated against what Hersh did not know when he wrote his book, that without exception, the opinions of all the professional historians and experienced journalists who offered opinions said the exact opposite of Hersh's gratuitous and not for the first time ignorant comment:

† Some of the Ex Comm meetings were tape-recorded by Kennedy who — under the recording system set up a few months earlier by the Secret Service — had to manually push a button to do so. The president and his brother were the only persons involved in the deliberations who knew that there could be a record for posterity. By the late 1980s the Kennedy Library began making public many of the transcribed proceedings of the Ex Comm; their historical value can only be diminished by the fact that the two key players of the crisis knew they were being recorded (page 351).

With the importance of this missile crisis in his book and its indispensability in his hate- Kennedy writing it is surprising that, when Hersh knew those tapes were accessible he did not get and use any to make the point. This does not encourage the belief Hersh had anything other than his anti-Kennedy venom to support his opinion that the "historical value" of those tapes was "diminished by the fact" that the President decided which conference to tape and not to tape.

What he records and what he does not record is true of every speech any president makes and any letter he writes.

The paragraph of Hersh's text and these notes, which happen to be on the same page, do not represent the writing of history or any intention to write history. History is not written with venom, as propaganda is written, with hatred unhidden. The writing of history is to record fact.

What Hersh has written is intended to be character assassination.

It certainly is not history!

Kennedy saw to it that more than the Ex Comm's "deliberations" were kept secret and he should have. Its existence, its composition, and its meetings and when and where they were also had to be secret. This was necessary for reasons that would have been essential in any presidency and in any government in any country. Our knowledge that those Soviet missiles were in Cuba, if not secret from the Soviets, could inspire them to even greater haste with the completion of those missile installations and with the shipments of other military personnel and equipment, including bombers.

The Ex Comm was not an operating unit. It was solely advisory and deliberative. Thus Kennedy did not give it any "goal" and when it was formed he gave it no choices such as between blockading Soviet shipping "or something more drastic." All actions were to and did come from Presidential decisions. It was for the best possible advice and guidance as he groped for those decisions in a crisis that was without precedent in history that he made his selections for and used his Ex Comm for.

As history does record, real history, not what Hersh has written, Kennedy's decision to create and use his Ex Comm and those he chose for it were wise and served the country and, indeed, the world, very well.

As Hersh also does not say in his writing designed to give false impressions, Kennedy did not select only those he knew thought as he did. He included and consulted with Republicans and conservative Democrats and military hard-liners. He wanted to choose his course from the best and wisest advice he could get and that was his basis in his selections for his Ex Comm and, indeed, for its existence.

To refer to these men as "insiders and outsiders" is literary rubbish. For their Ex Comm responsibilities they were all insiders and that some were not part of his government did not make them "outsiders." Not when the country's future if not existence was what they deliberated.

It is both ridiculous and spurious for Hersh to say that Kennedy's selections for his Ex Comm advisors "isolated those men who would lead a public charge against his stewardship of state." Anyone who says that about some of those men is both ignorant of them and defames them. Nothing could keep Dean Acheson, for example, quiet if he wanted to talk. Nor was closing a mouth the basis for any selection for the Ex Comm.

This is another of those endless Hersh inventions for the indulgence of his hatred and his baseless preconceptions.

The Ex Comm was composed of the most outstanding and trustworthy men and they did deliberate and they did consider alternatives.

It is Hersh-it writing for Hersh to say that this was all so that the President and his brother "could reap political gain" from a crisis that could have ended civilization as we knew it. And them with it!

Almost half of the country's population was within range of those Soviet missiles, including Washington, where the Kennedys and their families were.

What the Kennedys "struggled" for was to prevent war that could be a nuclear war. That was for "political gain"? Hersh says it was for that and only that!

It was not only with his brother that the President had "secret conversations" and despite what Hersh implies, there was nothing wrong with his having secret conversations with his brother, who was Attorney-General and one of his most trusted advisors, as the record shows he should have been.

Hersh's problems include the fact that the Ex Comm method of coming to understand the situation and what could be done about it worked and worked well, and he can't admit that. If there was a bright sun shining on President Kennedy's face Hersh would say it was midnight.

He writes about "those men who could lead a public charge against his [Kennedy's] stewardship of state" as though there were the slightest possibility of that or, with more of his mind reading, again from the grave, as though anything like that was in the President's mind.

If he failed, as even one so dominated by hatred and greed as Hersh should have realized, it would not be necessary to lead any "public charge against his stewardship." If he failed, Kennedy's failure would have been the end of his political life.

If he did not fail, as gloriously, magnificently he did not, who would dream of mounting "a public charge against his stewardship" that succeeded so wonderfully well?

Hersh is not able to suppress the Goebbels within him and it appears that at Little, Brown. Nobody wanted him to.

The sole test for this Hershification of one of the most difficult times in history, of any crisis any leader of any nation had ever faced, was could it be made into something defamatory of any Kennedy. If it could be, Hersh was the Thomas Edison of inventions of it.

How extraordinarily difficult a time it was is how in its October 19, 1997 issue, Barry Gewen, one of the New York Times Sunday book-review section's editors, began what he wrote about The Kennedy Tapes when they were published.

After reporting that ninety-two million Americans were immediately vulnerable to those Soviet missiles in Cuba, Gewen wrote,

It is not hyperbolic to say, as many have, that the Cuban missile crisis was the single most dangerous episode in the history of mankind.

(There is, naturally, no reflection of acknowledgment of this in Hersh. As there could not be if he were to have his book in which he argues otherwise.)

After referring to "those vindictive and resentful conspirators hatching their plots" in the Nixon tapes, Gewen says,

The missile crisis, by comparison, are elevating. They convey a sense of privilege, a conviction that we are privy to the deliberations at the highest level. This is how we want our leaders to behave.

Unless, of course, one is a Sy Hersh and has his objectives.

Richard Reeves, whose book President Kennedy: Profiles of Power, includes criticisms of Kennedy, wrote what amounts to a rave op-ed piece about those tapes and the book including them. The New York Times of October 8, 1997, titled it 13 Days in October, with the subhead J.F.K.'s character showed in a crisis. After commenting that Hersh and two TV news departments could fool around with fraudulent documents 'proving' that President Kennedy was being blackmailed by Marilyn Monroe," Reeves says that in Kennedy's

public life, his work was important enough that his decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis 35 years ago is still worthy of admiring study.

Recently published transcripts compiled in "The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis" show that Kennedy's public "character" was more elevated than his private character — not such a bad thing to those of us who try to be better than we know ourselves to be.

Reeves says that some believed the President had a short attention span. He then writes:

Yet, in the transcripts of taped White House meetings during the missile crisis in October 1962, President Kennedy was cool, careful and patient as he deliberated how to handle the Soviet threat.

The transcripts, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, are a wonderful read. One can feel the real difference between the President and his men, especially the generals who were demanding invasion of Cuba. Only Kennedy understood Nikita Khrushchev and the reasons the Soviets would risk the horrendous consequences of a nuclear exchange.

After the first days of knowing those Soviet missiles were in Cuba, after Kennedy and the others deliberate that for a while, he told those on the Ex Comm with whom he was talking:

"It makes them look as if they're co-equal with us . . . This is a political struggle as much as military."

He was exactly right. The United States had surrounded the Soviet Union with a picket fence of medium range missiles in Europe capable of reaching important targets in only a few minutes. . . . In effect, America held a loaded gun to the head of the Soviet Union.

Then Reeves quotes Kennedy further as he had not been quoted by others:

President Kennedy knew his man, a tough old politician. After it was all over, and the Soviets were dismantling and the missiles, Kennedy said he would have tried the same trick if he were in Khrushchev's position. The two of them also knew something else: neither of them intended to use nuclear weapons first.

Contrary to the Hersh fabrication that Kennedy sought to "humiliate" Khrushchev, as Reeves wrote,

In the 13 days of crisis after American spy planes spotted construction of the Cuban missile sites, the two leaders were obviously searching for a way out. Again and again, President Kennedy told his men that the object was to get the missiles out of Cuba but that the tactical goal was to "give Khrushchev room." "I don't want him in a corner," Kennedy said.

Can Hersh have written about the man of those tapes? The man of those decisions? The man who had the views others did not, who saw and understood what others did not? Hersh included?

Time 's Hugh Sidey, who had referred to what Hersh wrote as "evil," and Time was not pro-Kennedy, also commented on those tapes in the November 17 issue:

We recently got the transcripts of the Kennedy tapes from the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and there Kennedy is the serene leader who guides the nation away from nuclear conflict. He is the man with the best grasp of how wars arise from miscalculation and weakness, the man who turns aside his bellicose warriors.

In Time's major article that issue to which five contributed, it concluded with a comment about Hersh:

In fact, as recently released tapes reveal, Kennedy was very level-headed himself and pushed the strategy of trading Jupiter missiles in Turkey in order to defuse the crisis. In the book, Hersh turns this around and treats this deal (which, by the way, was acknowledged in 1987 by Kennedy's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk) as shocking.

The New York Review of Books had Tony Judt review the book on the tapes along with two others on that general subject, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-64, by Aliksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftalis, Norton; and The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Jupiters, 1957 -1963, by Philip Nash, University of North Carolina Press. One fairly long excerpted passage from The New York Review and two short excepts address the Hersh total invention, invented from nothing but Hersh's needs and hates, about the Hersh-imagined downgrading of those tapes by history. They down grade the self- downgrading Hersh:

The Kennedy Tapes reveal a remarkable coolness in John Kennedy, a willingness and a capacity to listen, question, absorb, weigh, and finally adjudicate in extraordinary circumstances. At each turn in the proceedings Kennedy chose the most moderate available option, sometimes against the specialized advice pressing in upon him. Instead of an invasion he favored an air strike on missile bases instead of a blanket air strike he favored selective strikes only; he insisted that no strikes, however selective, should happen until warning had been given. He opted for a naval blockade over immediate military action, and a partial naval quarantine over a blanket blockade on all shipping.

It was at Kennedy's insistence that an innocuous ship of non-Soviet registry was targeted for a symbolic exercise of the quarantine and he pressed his staff to obtain all possible legal and international support in advance of even that hinted action. He ignored suggestions that the US might take advantage of the quarantine to seize Soviet ships carrying missiles in order to learn more about the Soviet weapons program. He rebuffed all pressure to respond aggressively when Captain Rudolf Anderson's U-2 was shot down over Cuba on October 27, and repeatedly postponed the confidential deadline after which the countdown to US military intervention would begin. He welcomed the opportunity to use the Jupiter missiles in Turkey as a secret bargaining ploy and even authorized his secretary of state to have the United Nations urge him publicly to accept such a trade if all else failed. And just to be sure that there were no mistakes, on October 27 he instructed that those same Jupiter missiles be defused so that if he had to authorize air strikes on Cuba and the Soviets responded by an attack on the Turkish missile sites, there would be no nuclear risk of further escalation.

Each of these decisions was taken in the face of criticism from some quarter among his advisers and generals — according to George Ball the defusing of the Jupiters was ordered "much to the disgust of those eager for dramatic action." With hindsight we can see that Kennedy managed to obtain the best possible outcome in the circumstances. He was not just lucky, either, pace Acheson — he was consistent.

This impartial selection in the lengthy review make a nonstop liar of Hersh and exposes him to be, despite his long professional experience, ignorant of what he writes about. On all those issues and points Hersh sought to make important, what Hersh said was not true, and the available and public record he ignored proved what he said to be untrue. Hersh did use the Kennedy library, he says. Those tapes were freely available there, where the professors who edited them into the book had that access to them.

As Judt gets to his end, he comments on those who to Hersh were "outsiders" and should not have been on the Ex Comm, on some who were and on Kennedy:

McGeorge Bundy's logic, Dean Acheson's diplomatic experience, and even Robert McNamara's years as head of the Ford Motor Company had furnished none of them with that "seat of the pants" instinct that John Kennedy (like Lyndon Johnson) brought to the Ex Comm discussions. In any case, how many recent US presidents would have fared better than Kennedy, or even half as well?

Judt then wonders at his ending how it would have been had some of those who succeeded Kennedy had that crisis he faced:

It is a grimly sobering exercise to insert into The Kennedy Tapes some of JFK's recent successors and guess at their likely conduct under such pressure. One of the side benefits of the Cuban crisis is that none of them has ever had to face similarly trying circumstances. Meanwhile the editors of The Kennedy Tapes are I think, convincing when they write "it seems fortunate that, given the circumstances that he had helped create, Kennedy was the president charged with managing the crisis."

Not one agrees with Hersh. Not one is critical of the way Kennedy handled the United States of that crisis.

The summary of Hendrik Hertzberg in his "Tales of the Tapes" in The New Yorker is pretty much the universal opinion, that what the book has of them

has the advantage of being a suspenseful self-contained narrative of a single intense episode — the Cuban missile crisis, which in retrospect stands as the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. In the cauldron of the crisis, the forty-five- year-old President emerges as everything his hagiographers have proclaimed him to be, calm, lucid, commanding and far-seeing.

There is more, much more like this, but this selection should be enough.

Compare these mature and independent opinions and evaluations with what is quoted from Hersh at the beginning of this chapter. Doing that alone tells us much about Hersh and his book and what he reflects about himself and his book.

Everyone saw it as what is quoted above says — except Hersh.

Not one saw the "diminished" value he saw in those tapes.

Hersh could find some way of being critical of how the President breathed.

If not that he did breath. So, he had to say the value of the tapes was "diminished" because each and every minute of all the many meetings of the Ex Comm, regardless of how unimportant some of the conversations were, was not recorded and thus increased enormously what is a large volume.

By universal opinion, the lone dissenter being the Hersh who decided to become a rich man by ruining the President's reputation, they are a remarkable tribute to a remarkable man who performed remarkably well during what could have been the greatest crisis in the history of the world.

It may well have been too late for Hersh to write critically of the editing of The Kennedy Tapes, but they were further reduced in volume by having been edited. He would no doubt have found that a basis for criticism, and that the editing as by professional scholars, and that the co- publisher was Harvard University.

Their conclusion, however, seems to be shared by all who have studied those tapes of those deliberations: "fortunate . . . Kennedy was the president charged with managing the crisis."

This understates what some said, as we see above. It is fair, except for Hersh, who can find anything fair about the Kennedys to be unfair.