Chapter 18

Conclusions

There are many pages I copied from the Hersh book to address in this manuscript that I am not addressing. Many pages I'd copied from books by writers Hersh does not like because they are pro-Kennedy or by or about Robert Kennedy. Respected authors like Schlesinger and Sorenson who wrote respectable and honesty books about which even their enemies never spoke as most critics and commentators spoke about this Hersh book.

Almost all disapproving of Hersh.

Although Hersh's is anti-Kennedy, even the political right had no use for him or his book. In the January, 1998 American Spectator there is an article critical of him and his book by John Corry. It is titled, "Same Old Sy Hersh." Its opinion is, as it begins, "Poor Seymour Hersh; hardly any respectable journalist will praise him. It seems he shoots from the hip, makes wild surmises, and recycles rumors. . . . hard as Hersh tried, he apparently couldn't deliver." Then, "For all the chest-thumping Hersh does about his reporting, too often it is mere speculation and surmise."

Even the anti-Kennedyites could not stomach him and his book.

What I have not used that I had intended to use is not necessary. This is enough of an exposure of Hersh, who is merely the latest, as of the time of this writing, to seek to exploit and commercialize the Kennedys and the Kennedy assassination

With the financial success of his book other writers and other publishers, both with as little concern for the country as shown by Hersh and by Little, Brown — and the Book-of-the-Month- Club and the History Book Club (this slop is history for the History Book Club?) — may be tempted to try to make money from another angle of the same kind of abuse of fact and of our history.

That there was little or nothing new and nothing new of any importance in this Hershification need make no difference to those who would copy and exploit the basic idea.

Hersh was going to make his killing on personal scandals with forgeries that common sense should have told him were at least largely fakes. But his lust for that loot and the cheap fame if not for retirement took control of what had once been a fine reporter and he spent, he admits, two years with that trash that was obviously faked trash.

That there was little new in the book, that it was mostly rehash and fabrication, did not discourage publication or the TV show based on it.

Take the rehash of the personal stuff away and what remains, although we did not take the time to address all of it, is pretty thoroughly demolished.

It just is not true. Hersh made it up or used what others made up.

How little there is new in the personal stuff caught my eye as I walked past my store of videocassettes and saw one I've never looked at and do not look at now. It was sent to me long ago. Most of the cover of the box is a picture of the assassinated President. There are smiling pictures of his also assassinated brother Robert and of his father and a scowling picture of Senator Edward Kennedy. The title, in large letters, is "Kennedy Scandals." There is a subtitle, "Now it can be told!" when, several years ago, it then was a rehash.

On the back it has pictures of Marilyn Monroe, — she of a fake on which Hersh wasted two years — and other women, and seven headlined paragraphs on what it claims to go into. On Edward it has a version that Hersh ignored, Chapaquiddick. It has a section on the father and then on JFK personally what is headed "The Nazi Spy," "JFK's Secret Marriage" (that Hersh sought to palm off as his big "discovery"), "Marilyn Monroe," "The Mafia Connection," which as we saw did not exist, and "Assassinations," which is described modestly as "the biggest Kennedy scandal," and in which there was in fact no Kennedy.

So, aside from hype and fabrication and fiction Hersh has nothing new except what was properly described as his "slop" that henceforth he will live in, regardless of how many of the books are sold.

He has gone from his earned Pulitzer to being the slop merchant.

This manuscript might well have been titled The Decline and Fall of Sy Hersh.

It is tragic, genuinely tragic, that a man who has done the fine and important work Hersh has done and can do to seek to retire on literary slop that shames him and shames publishing and shames the nation.

It happens that the day I wrote this I received from a friend in Canada another Andrew Cohen bid on the Brooklyn Bridge, so to speak about his reporting, from the January 10, 1998 Toronto Globe and Mail. To it and to Cohen either promoting Hersh or "savaging" Kennedy meant so much that story, which began on the front page and was continued inside on three additional pages, was worth a hundred and ninety-six and a half square inches of space!

This story, Cohen says, is about Hersh. "There is about him, a sense of the maniacal. The eyes bore, the hands flail, the body coils."

His book, Cohen says, is to be "the death rattle of the Kennedys."

Bearing on this, at the very end of this long puff piece, Cohen writes what he says Hersh told him:

The sex, he allows, was a sideshow to the main attraction, which was Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, the plot to kill Castro. 'It's a different business today,' he sighs.

Whatever, if anything, Hersh meant by "It's a different business today," Cohen does not say.

Nor, apparently, did he know enough, or care enough, to learn whether what Hersh wrote about other than the "sideshow" of his, about Vietnam, the Cuba missile crisis and the plot to kill Castro, bore any relationship to the truth.

Which, as we have seen, in not one instance does it.

And, if a reporter with Hersh's record could not see that when he wrote it, there is a question about his rationality along with so many questions about his honesty, his principles and his personal and professional integrity.

The sex, that "sideshow", is rehash and fictional. The rest is simply not true, just made up to suit the need Hersh perceived to have a book that could make him rich, be his "score," give him his retirement without having to work for a living.

Or, there is nothing new and true in his book, which he intended, Globe and Mail subhead, to be "Snuffing out the Kennedy Flame."

To do what he did, as Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post, Hersh's book

is a patchwork of conspiracy theories, third hand rumors, wild conjectures and anecdotal evidence, couched in terms relentlessly adversarial and so vindictive as to render it without credibility.

What we have seen of that more than confirms Yardley.

Garry Wills, who is also a historian, said in The New York Review of Hersh and his book,

It is an astonishing spectacle, this book. In his mad zeal to destroy Camelot, to raze it down, dance on the rubble and sow salt on the ground where it stood, Hersh has, with precision and method, disassembled his own career and reputation.

What Yardley wrote amounts to praise for the book in which so much is, as we have seen, made up out of nothing.

What Willis wrote is suitable for the epitaph that should mark the end of the career that is capable of such hatred, such venom, such dishonesty, all of the money if not for political reasons, too.

Hersh did tell Cohen what belongs on his epitaph. Cohen quotes Hersh as telling him, "I'm amazed at myself, I yap so much."

Telling Cohen that the second-hand and often fictitious sex in his book is but a "sideshow" was Hersh yakking too much.

Hersh telling the other Toronto reporter, Lynda Hurst, that there was "rough justice" in the assassination, which was to say that Hersh believed Kennedy should have been assassinated, was, again Hersh yakking too much.

The Hersh who also pleaded to her " Gimme a break" when she asked for authentication of a single assassination Kennedy authorized.

For Hersh there is nothing but fakes. He wasted, by his own admission, two years on what was obviously fakes, so much did he long for fakes he could commercialize, make money from. When it was without question that he did not dare go with those fakes that had been made up, he went with his own, what we have seen is still fakes. This is true even of part of his "sideshow."

In the end it was still Hersh faking Kennedy.

And getting rich doing that.

In beds or in books, whoring is whoring.